https://www.presspage.com/news/
Empowering your messageen-usSat, 17 Feb 2018 16:50:53 +0100Tue, 13 Feb 2018 16:39:13 +0100https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/clients/150_63.jpghttps://www.presspage.com/news/
1446 ways to build a great mobile newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/6-ways-to-build-a-great-mobile-newsroom/
https://www.presspage.com/news/6-ways-to-build-a-great-mobile-newsroom/A few tips for organizations to building a great mobile newsroomOrganizations are increasingly aware that newsrooms must be like the news media they are designed for, delivering great content.

Yet as the mobile revolution takes hold, it is no longer wise to think primarily about desktop users when designing a newsroom.

Mobile use is skyrocketing, and beginning this year, Google will move to mobile-first indexing when it ranks results, as opposed to the desktop-first it currently employs, says Jared Hoffmann digital content editor at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.

“Sixty percent of our website visitors are visiting on mobile devices, so we know that mobile is important,” says Hoffmann, whose organization uses a PressPage newsroom.

How then should organizations think about their newsrooms, given that reporters and stakeholders access them on the go from mobile phones? Here are a few tips:

1. Think about the mobile experience.

The current trend in developing newsroom websites is “responsive design” – that is, designing newsrooms which detect and adapt to the screen size of the user - thus creating a pleasant experience regardless of device.

Yet contrary to popular belief, responsive design does not mean fitting the entire newsroom site on the user’s screen. The information provided on a desktop view of your newsroom, such press release teasers, are unnecessary and hazardous to creating a positive mobile experience.

As a result, an important part of developing a responsive newsroom is deciding which information to prune for mobile users.

This is cumbersome to manage from a governance perspective, and it is difficult to keep key information consistent.

Nevertheless, nowadays you must think beyond responsive design to “mobile experience,” or architecting one’s website in a friendly way to get people the information they are seeking as conveniently as possible, Hoffman says.

Here’s why. A newsroom might still be responsive—scaling for smartphones—annoy mobile users with endless navigation and icons users must scroll past to find what they’re looking for.

“The tasks that someone might complete when they come to a given page are not necessarily the first things that you see,” Hoffman says.

Children’s Mercy is redesigning with a goal of anticipating what most people are looking for, and placing that information up top. Most of its patient families are looking to make an appointment, and to log in to the patient portal.

2. Make it sticky, not a pogo stick.

There’s an additional benefit to thinking about what your site users are searching for: It boosts search engine optimization, Hoffman says. “Pogo-sticking” is the term for when people Google up your site, click on it, can’t find what they need, and bounce back out to the search results page.

If people then go to elsewhere and spend more time there, Google begins to favor that other destination. Think, therefore, about giving your users what will keep them there.

“By making it easier for them,” Hoffman says, “we’re making it more competitive for Google to rank us in the long-term as well.”

3. Create great content.

It is no longer sufficient to dump text documents and a staid photo in press releases. Newsroom content must be more dynamic, and that includes mobile newsrooms.

“Let’s not just put up Word docs and pictures,” says Brad Nevin, editor-in-chief, Nissan global communications website platforms. “How can we make our stories rich and colorful? We use video. We use cinemagraphs. We use sound files. We use social media video. We use the Instagram series of images.”

Marketing can be a source of imagery content such as photos or videos that are useful to communicators at Nissan. The challenge, Nevin says, is not looking like an ad.

“We think of it as a real home run when a third-party [such as an auto magazine] uses these,” he says.

4. Don’t overdo the bells and whistles.

Google prefers sites that download more quickly. When designing a page in your newsroom, don’t use a 13-megabyte image where a smaller one will work, Hoffman says. It’s also possible to have too many outbound links, potentially confusing visitors.

“All of your content should architect around those very specific goals, and then nothing else,” he says. “Don’t be tempted to throw in too many extra things in case somebody needs it. Start with the core things you’re delivering and make sure that is displayed in a prominent way.”

5. Create an app.

Because mobile devices use public software platforms, anybody can create an application to use for marketing and public relations purposes, says marketing strategist David Meerman Scott. He has an app that includes blog posts, his Twitter feed and videos, and they link to his online bookstore on Amazon.

Reporters are active on mobiles, so Scott urges those in public relations, analyst relations and investor relations to create apps that reach their constituents. The online newsroom is evolving, and organizations should design content-rich online media rooms filled with blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books, press releases and background information, Scott says.

Scott adds, “When a reporter or analyst has an application for the company, or music artist, or nonprofit she covers on her mobile, then she can easily check what’s going on, as well as generate alerts for things like press releases—all on her device of choice.”

6. Survey or hold focus groups.

Not every news media outlet wants information dished out in the same way, says Whitney Drake, manager of the story bureau and analytics team at General Motors. That’s why GM offers a variety of content to serve the needs of various reporters.

For starters, ensure that your media contacts are easily located. “In terms of contacts, the ability to click on a phone number and dial out is important,” Drake says.

Surveys and focus groups can provide valuable information about what reporters need. The GM newsroom offers picture and video galleries that reporters can pull from. Though it wouldn’t be easy to drag in a reporter from many newspapers and magazines, GM has other experienced journalists it can consult.

“In the auto industry, we are very fortunate that we have a lot of dedicated auto writers,” Drake says. “We can leverage them, talk to them, or actually bring them in.”

This revised article has been published before onPRdaily.com on January 19, 2018.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,NewsTue, 13 Feb 2018 04:51:40 -06008 ways to boost your newsroom’s SEOhttps://www.presspage.com/news/8-ways-to-boost-your-newsrooms-seo/
https://www.presspage.com/news/8-ways-to-boost-your-newsrooms-seo/Are you finding it hard to get the attention of Google and other search giants?No fair. Your organization wrote the book on that topic that’s all over the evening news. Yet the evil search bots are ignoring you, and reporters never call.
]]>The answer isn’t gaming the system, but creating a smart newsroom that offers vital topical information that scoops up interested journalists and members of the public.

Whereas companies once cranked out mostly text stories, search engines nowadays also look for videos, images, sound files and other digital assets that tell a story.

Sorry, your press releases don’t count—not if you are spreading them far and wide through distribution services. Even if your organization created that snazzy story and video package, it’s not exclusive when it appears all over the web, says Shel Holtz.

“They think of themselves as a media company,” Holtz says, “and this is a good demonstration of that.”

Update often.

It’s essential to add new stories and other content frequently, says Brad Nevin, editor-in-chief of Nissan’s global communications website platforms. Updates train your audience to come back. Though Nissan’s newsroom targets journalists, savvy fans have learned that car news often appears there before it does on Nissan’s marketing sites.

“If they come back and see nothing’s new three, four days, it’s just natural that people will say, ‘Oh, they never update this site,’” Nevin says, “and they don’t go back again—ever.”

Holtz adds that for a small organization, weekly updates might be fine, but those with the resources to do so should add content more frequently.

Use your customers’ terminology.

A contemporary newsroom allows you to publish content that you once might have confined to a news media pitch, says Jake Jacobson, director of public relations at Children’s Mercy. Now the hospital communicators say, “Why don’t we just publish it ourselves?”

That said, Google might not find you if people are searching for different terms from those you use. “Do people say ‘cancer’ or ‘oncology’?’” Jacobson says. “We want to make sure that we write in language that he [IT] is going to be using from an SEO standpoint—because why would we make our own teammates’ job harder?”

For example, there’s the contrast between the words “radiology” and “medical imaging,” he says. Searches of “radiology” tend to pull academic, peer-to-peer articles. “Medical imaging” is more directed to hospitals and out-patient information of the sort patients and families would search.

Beyond that, Nissan’s global newsroom is automated to take care of important aspects of SEO, particularly headlines, Nevin says. First, most of Nissan’s stories include the headline in the URL, making it highly searchable.

“It mirrors the simple task of how to write a good headline,” Nevin says. “So you have the important words in your headline.”

Write ‘kickers’ for your headlines.

When writing for your newsroom, Nissan adds “kickers” or subheads under its stories, Nevin says. A colleague of his in Tokyo researched this and proved that kickers help boost SEO.

The following headline/kicker combination adds information for search bots to scoop up:

Field test with local participants to take place in March in Yokohama.

Referring to his number-crunching colleague, Nevin adds, “He also says that helps the reader get a good feel for the stories really fast, instead of scrolling down and reading six paragraphs.”

Use tags that enable voice searches.

With the growth of mobile, half of all searches are done by voice, and that number is increasing, Holtz says. Thus, you need h1, h2 and meta title tags in place to draw search engines to your content.

“Increasingly, using the right tags is going to be important as you want your content to be found as a result of voice search,” Holtz says.

Deploy social media.

Nevin places information on LinkedIn, and Nissan’s team in Japan handles the Twitter account. In the United States, however, marketing controls Twitter and Facebook.

The tweets tend to be more consumer-oriented and less hard-news in their approach. Because of that, Nissan is establishing a U.S. Twitter account for news, enabling it to boost its stories and better target Twitter-using journalists.

“Amplifying news on social media is really important,” Nevin says. “But does it share with the consumer site, or does it get its own account?”

When the communications team produces new content, Children’s Mercy looks for supporting information within the site. If the newsroom has a separate URL from that of your main organization, cross-links between the site can also support your content.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,SEOWed, 17 Jan 2018 03:41:32 -0600'Mobilizing' your newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/mobilizing-your-newsroom/
https://www.presspage.com/news/mobilizing-your-newsroom/An essential part for a smooth running global newsroom is optimizing it for mobile visitors.How to Optimize your Newsroom for International Audiences Part 4 of 4

In 2016 it finally happened…mobile traffic overtook the desktop as the primary method used to access websites. Inevitably this also means that most of your newsroom’s traffic will also come from mobile devices. This article presents essential tips on ensuring a solid modern digital comms strategy does not fall apart on mobile unfriendliness.

]]>In parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series on ‘optimizing your newsroom for global audiences,’ we discussed the importance of ensuring your newsroom was accessible, providing approachable contacts, and ensuring you localize content as much as possible. Part 4 dives into web technology; and the first essential part for a smooth running newsroom is optimizing it for mobile visitors.

The need for a mobile-friendly newsroom

As a communications professional, you are in constant competition to get any second of attention from your target audiences. This means catching them on-the-go during their commute home or as they flip through the phone during a brief moment on the couch. When you are lucky enough to actually get their click, a slow download or unreadable page will be a disaster for your news conversion rate.

With mobile traffic growing at an incredible pace (seecomScore’s Global Mobile Report 2017), having a mobile optimized newsroom in and of itself still sets you apart from almost half of your competitors. Many organizations still work with PDF based newsroom repositories, that besides not being mobile-friendly, also deliver poor SEO results. Even those that do have have HTML newsrooms often lack a responsive design resulting in a cumbersome (if not impossible) readability experience.

The solution for your newsroom is to follow a few simple rules as you plan for your mobile environment.

Main pointers for ‘mobilizing’ your newsroom

According toGoogle, there are three main points that are essential in ensuring your newsroom’s responsiveness will be beneficial:

First of all, and like any other webpage, blocking search engines from accessing your page files will not help your cause. The search bots need to be able to index web content, but also understand it is designed for mobile (see point 2).

Clearly indicate in the page’s code that it is designed for mobile. If Google is signalled that a page is mobile-friendly, it is able to index the page better for mobile searchers. Effectively increasing your SEO results.

Ensure your page design works on a mobile device. This is not so much a technical requirement, but is more about the user experience. Think about pop-up ads that completely block a screen and essentially freeze navigation, unplayable videos, and touch elements that are too close together and ultimately frustrate the user you are trying engage.

All in all, a better mobile newsroom will immediately increase your chance to reach the influencers you need to spread your message and the journalists you want to report on your story and return for future updates.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,news,globalnewsroom,mobile,SEOTue, 19 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0600When it comes to content… Go local!https://www.presspage.com/news/when-it-comes-to-content-go-local/
https://www.presspage.com/news/when-it-comes-to-content-go-local/Why your global newsroom should localize content as much as possible.How to Optimize your Newsroom for International Audiences Part 3 of 4

Doing business on an international level is no longer solely in the domain of the multinational corporations. In essence, any organization with a website has access to global markets. But the idea of adapting your newsroom to a multilingual destination may still seem both expensive and daunting. It is therefore worth understanding the many potential benefits that await by doing so.

]]>In essence, a localized newsroom will allow you to gain more traction in a new market - and thus provide more exposure for your product and services. Here are 5 simple tips to keep in mind when going local:

1. Serve them well

If your business is serious about a specific geographical market, it should make a statement by taking its potential audiences seriously. By localizing content - not only its language, but also thematically - an organization demonstrates understanding the market they are in, and show genuine intent in building market relations, including the media.

In the past, localizing content would have been a major competitive business advantage. These days however, not having it can be seen more as a ‘disqualifier.’ The basic rule here is simple:If you are not doing it, you can rest assured your competition is.

But how does that work with media relations? Not much different really. The attention span of Internet audiences is short, however, that of journalists on a deadline might even be shorter. Translation and interpretation of news releases is not only a tedious, but also a time-consuming act. Having reporters translate your message for local publication will decrease the chance of earned media conversion tremendously.

2. Improved search ranking

For those of you new to digital PR, SEO (search engine optimization) has been an important factor in making your news easy to find, easy to crawl, and easy to categorize. It is about helping your audiences find your content from among other sources.

When done well, localizing your newsroom will increase your search ranking for a specific language (or geographical market). According to theSimilar Web Search Report, organic search equates close to 95% of all traffic.

Good news for Anglo Saxon companies extending their business and media relations efforts to non-English speaking countries: in languages other than English, there is significantly less competition in SEO keywords. This would allow your newsroom’s localized content to contribute to bottom line web traffic a lot quicker.

3. Media and influencer lists

SEO and social are great ways to drive traffic to your website. However, in both cases, these require organic growth and thus a ‘warmup period’ before they become effective.

A good alternative is to also work with media and influencer lists. There are many global and local media and influencer database providers. In most cases they allow the user to select contacts by region, type of outlet and subject expertise. Besides these basic selection criteria, databases often also indicate the best - or preferred - way to get in touch with these contacts.

4. Establish credibility

Credibility is gained when newsroom visitors have a pleasant experience interacting with your brand’s news. Not being able to understand your content will hamper that goal. Therefore, before spending time and resources on ‘bells and whistles,’ ensure you get the fundamentals right:

Your newsroom should generally only include relevant news releases for the specific market it is targeting. All other news is effectively irrelevant and therefore distracting

5. Make or buy?

Do you ask IT to build your global newsrooms? Or can you get a superior off-the-shelf product that looks like you built it yourselves and features a seamless experience in each of your regional markets?

The good news is that a global newsroom rollout can be done at a fraction of the in-house costs and with technology and workflow far superior to what your IT team can build.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,International,globalnewsroomTue, 05 Dec 2017 13:00:05 -0600Infographic: How to create a content calendarhttps://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-how-to-create-a-content-calendar/
https://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-how-to-create-a-content-calendar/Here you will find our latest infographic. Using infographics can help you gain more traffic. The PressPage platform allows you to easily embed infographic, 'pin' these straight away into your Pinterest account and it will be included in your media library. Interested in learning more about how to use infographics in your newsroom? Check out our our media library to see more infographics or try out PressPage for 14-days to see how it can work for you.
]]>This infographic is about creating a content calendar. There is a world of difference between good intentions and a working, and successful communication strategy. Start by going through at these five steps to help you create a content calendar.
]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,infographicTue, 28 Nov 2017 05:00:00 -0600Showcase your global media contactshttps://www.presspage.com/news/showcase-your-media-contacts/
https://www.presspage.com/news/showcase-your-media-contacts/Getting personal will set you apart from the crowd when building better media relations.How to Optimize your Newsroom for International Audiences Part 2 of 4

As journalists continue to use the web to do parts of their research, they have come to expect certain features from a company’s online newsroom. For example, it should present a clear and concise idea of what the company does, how it started, and where it is based. It should prominently display the latest news and events, as well as state the various ways a visitor can contact a person or department within the company.

]]>Provide reachable contacts

Believe it or not, reporters seeking contact names and phone numbers often can’t find them on websites (or even in press releases). The traditional pressroom tends to just feature the name, e- mail address and phone number of just one or two contact persons a journalist can reach for questions or comments on a story.

By contrast, Velux offers an easy to find list of spokespersons on topics and by geographical market. The contacts page also includes some simple FAQ’s that already might answer the most common questions.

It is vital that your newsroom allows you to feature online business cards of all your contacts. These cards should feature the contact’s picture, job description, telephone numbers, email addresses, and Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.

The link to social media profiles of individual media contacts has become increasingly important as it helps journalists and influencers follow the spokesperson as a relevant source of news. In recent studies, 75 percent of journalists describe social media as “completely” or “to a large extent” necessary to promote and distribute content.*

Besides providing these contact cards, it would even be more helpful to clearly state what subjects, questions, or business areas that particular contact could help with – saving time for journalists and other influencers looking for the right source to get the needed information from, and increasing your brand's chances of earned media conversion.

However, providing contact details of your comms team does mean they need to be accessible. You probably know best of all if reporters can really connect with you? Meaning that besides the fact your contact details are clearly mentioned on the release page, think about your availability: is your daily schedule filled with meetings, your mobile phone on mute and your direct line places callers straight into your overflowing voicemail? If this is the case, then maybe you should indeed not put your contact details on display, but at the same time you might need to question your priorites concerning earned media.

In this day and age of bot-phones and web-based artificial intelligence, your stories might just get better footing because reporters and bloggers can actually talk to a person while on the story.

*) Source: 2017 Global Social Journalism Study.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,International,Contacts,globalnewsroomWed, 22 Nov 2017 01:07:25 -0600Google News: a new way to spread the storyhttps://www.presspage.com/news/google-news-a-new-way-to-spread-the-story/
https://www.presspage.com/news/google-news-a-new-way-to-spread-the-story/Google News is a service that aims to organize all the world’s news, while providing the best possible experience for visitors seeking useful and timely news information. Companies can use Google News as a new channel to distribute their news, however little is known yet about the impact of Google News and how to get your news included. Find out more about this new way to spread the story.
]]>When the Global Financial Crisis occurred in 2008, traditional news media was hit hard. As thousands of journalists lost their jobs, they left a big vacuum in the field of content publishing. Around the same time, Web 2.0 was just taking off, with Facebook, Twitter, and most importantly Google, spreading their influence into the media industry.

These tech giants allowed citizen journalism to proliferate, and for PR, this meant that companies could now become the source of their own news. No longer would they rely on journalists to publish their news – PR departments stepped past journalists to begin producing and disseminating brand journalism to the audiences that mattered most.

One of the tools that greatly enabled this is Google News, a product launched by Google in 2006. With Google News, brands could now become legitimate providers of news.

What is Google News?

But let’s start with the basics. Google News is a service that aims to organize all the world’s news, while providing the best possible experience for visitors seeking useful and timely news information.

Google gathers the news for different topics/themes, providing readers information that is most relevant to them. This is not just news from The New York Times or other big news outlets. Any legitimate news source can be incorporated in Google News if they follows the guidelines Google has created. These guidelines help Google maintain fairness and consistency when determining which site they will include. Getting indexed on Google News relies on several factors:

Topic factors: How interesting or popular is the news topic?

Story factors: How relevant and fresh is the content specific to this topic?

Brand reputation: Similar toDomain Authority, except this is just for news.

Timing: Timeliness of a news story is vital, but also hard to predict. But if you are the one that breaks a huge story first, a lot of traffic will come from the first page of Google News.

Why should you have your news included in Google News?

Having your news indexed in Google News can have a positive effect on your website Search Engine ranking. Indexation improves your reach and visibility, which results in more traffic. But there are some other important reasons as well:

Trust

Over 60% of people trust Google News more than they trust the news outlets contained in Google’s Index (2016 Edelman Trust Barometer). So if a headline is featured in Google News, people are likely to trust it more than if they read the same headline on the original source. The level of trust, when combined with the previous expected returning visitors, opens up a broader business value outside of the traditional search metrics of impressions, traffic and revenue. Trust can be a core online differentiator between brands and websites, impacting user behavior at pre-click (advert), and post-click (website) stages.

Making more out of your content

For every company, it is important to get your content out there and make the best use of it. Having your news included in Google News is just another way to use your content in a more optimal way. In terms of time, effort, and money, Google News provides a better ROI than most other forms of content distribution.

SEO

When we talk about Google, then SEO is definitely a topic that we should address. While SEO-friendliness involves many technical and editorial actions, having your news included in Google News will have a positive effect on your SEO. Since Google sees its own product ‘Google News’ as a trusted source, an indexed story will appear higher in search results than other news results.

Why a good newsroom is essential

The starting point for this whole story is of course having a great online news center. It is important to keep your online newsroom up to date with regards to the factors that determine your inclusion in Google News. Does your newsroom:

Allow you to categorise your content?

Offers you the option to specify the standout URL? (If you place the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results.)

Gives you the opportunity to manually edit the meta tags, description and titles?

Have a sitemap? Asitemap for Google Newslets you control which content you submit to Google News, so it is important that your newsroom allows you to generate one specifically for your news.

How do you get your news included in Google News?

There are a couple of guidelines that you should follow to maximise your chances of being included in Google News:

Technical guidelines: At a top-level you need to ensure the following:

URLs and anchor links are descriptive of the content, unique and permanent

Content is provided in HTML format only. PDFs, JavaScript and other content types cannot be crawled or displayed. In most cases, multimedia content (YouTube being the occasional exception) will not be included

The domain on which the content is hosted needs to be accessible to search engine bots

Quality guidelines: Quality is an aspect which is extremely important for Google, however this sometimes can be difficult to define. Take a look aWebmaster Quality Guidelinesto objectively compare your content to the top ranking sites on the same topic. Ensure that you content exceeds the basic requirements such as depth, variation, opinion, expertise, trust, and statistics.

News content only

This might seem like a no-brainer, but keep in mind that Google News only includes news content. It has no use to try to get all of your content included, because that won’t work. Overall content that is industry-specific and company-neutral, so not marketing or PR-based, has a larger chance of being included. You can increase your chances by including expert quotes and opinion, as long as it is not a business advertisement or a promotional piece.

]]>SaaS,News,SEO,Newsroom,Google,Google NewsMon, 13 Nov 2017 08:00:00 -0600Searching for El Doradohttps://www.presspage.com/news/searching-for-el-dorado/
https://www.presspage.com/news/searching-for-el-dorado/Making your newsroom findable and accessible for international audiences.How to Optimize your Newsroom for International Audiences Part 1 of 4

As the world’s economy globalizes and commercial success of businesses becomes ever more intertwined with other markets, the communication departments of many organizations need to cope with new sets of audiences. In this first of 4 articles, we dive into the reason PR pros should not hide their news.

]]>Fifteen years ago, reporters probably found your corporate pressroom by typing in your company’s URL and looking for an “about us” or “contact” page. Today, they are more likely to arrive via a Google search or a snippet and link from a social channel. They might have run across your organization by means of a tweet, a relevant hashtag or a trending story on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Going global

The language barrier is the most obvious initial challenge for communication professionals when dealing with new geographical markets. Even though you can get quite far with English, cultural subtleties, tone of voice and local do’s and don’ts need to be taken into consideration. It is therefore key to ensure you have the right content translation processes in place.

Additionally, it must be acknowledged that addressing a market in its own language and with localized content can be much appreciated by local audiences, as it demonstrates commitment. Some important local communiqués are not worth placing on the global corporate newsroom, but do need a formal home for audiences from a specific market.

'Search' is another key issue for the need to localize newsrooms. A search engine will look for the language code in a page for it to be indexed on keywords. If you place German press release in a page that is set up for English, Google and other search engines will be confused to say the least (see the short video on meta geo tags on the right).

Therefore, setting up your newsroom infrastructure to accommodate the languages of key geographical markets is a critical first step.

Build and they will come...

Wrong! Your newsroom needs to be easily accessible, searchable and shareable. However, to make sure it is accessible, searchable and its content shareable, it needs to be found first.

Many companies still hide their newsroom in the ‘About Us’ drop down menus and refrain from showcasing their latest news articles on their homepages. In essence, hiding what they have to say and making the newsroom anEl Dorado(the mythical Colombian city of gold that is yet to be found) of some sort.

It is best to place an easy to find button on your homepage that links to your newsroom. Avoid the word ‘Press’ or ‘Pressroom.’ The media landscape has changed so dramatically that most brands are now also writing for other audiences -think clients, partners, staff, influencers- and the word ‘Press’ would discourage them from clicking on it.

Feed your news

A great way of making your news more accessible is by feeding news snippets to the homepage of your website. The homepage, at many times a quite static page, will be automatically updated with each release you publish.

Furthermore, ensure that your newsroom can be found through search engines. For this it is imperative that you use the correct language codes for each newsroom and refrain from mixing different languages in one newsroom; this will confuse searches and can even lead to exclusion from search results.

Socialize your news

By making your news socially shareable and directly pushing your content to selected social media handles, you are providing backlinks to your news articles, and thus your newsroom.

But it is not only this direct distribution to your timelines and feeds and the echoing of influencers that matters, setting up a Facebook newsroom can be a tremendous asset. The Facebook newsroom promotes your content in a significant manner by mirroring your corporate news and PR contacts.

This is part 1 of a series of 4 short articles on how to best set up your newsroom for international audiences.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,El Dorado,International,globalnewsroomTue, 07 Nov 2017 08:48:49 -0600Measuring PR success in terms of quantity and qualityhttps://www.presspage.com/news/measuring-pr-success-in-terms-of-quantity-and-quality/
https://www.presspage.com/news/measuring-pr-success-in-terms-of-quantity-and-quality/Although PR itself is not “hard” science, there are definitely ways to measure the ROI of your PR efforts. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics, PR results can be measured, analyzed and compared.
]]>Sixty cold calls result in three new magazine subscriptions. Conversion: 5 percent. An email campaign sent to seven hundred customers makes fourteen of them buy your new product. Conversion: 2 percent. An in-depth interview with your CEO on her vision and goals for 2017 is picked up by several blogs and is widely read by your target audience. Conversion: no idea.

Though it should be obvious your PR practices play a vital role in promoting your organization and its products and services, you probably have a significantly harder time determining the actual value than your colleagues at the marketing and sales departments do. Their hard metrics of leads and sales are usually not applicable to your content and its success, which could very well match those cold calls and (semi-)anonymous emails. Still, there are several ways to quantitatively measure the ROI of PR. With the added value of qualitative analysis, it’s possible to keep track of your performance and use it to base future predictions and strategies on.

Quantitatively measuring PR results

What you should NOT do when describing your PR success in quantitative terms, is use the well-known but highly criticized Advertising Value Equivalencies (AVE). Putting a dollar value on media coverage and using it to compare with advertising costs is problematic for anumber of reasons. In many cases no actual advertising rates exist, for example, and there is no factual basis for the assumption that a news story of a particular size has equal impact to an advertisement of the same size.

TheBarcelona Principles, a set of seven voluntary guidelines established by the PR industry itself, calls for the specific exclusion of AVE metrics in measuring the efficacy of PR campaigns. Quantitatively measuring PR results, following the Barcelona Principles, includes tracking metrics like impressions among the stakeholder or target audience. You may consider tracking some or all of the following:

Detailed reach of media coverage: circulation for print media, number of visitors or specific page views for online media

Number of pageviews for publication on own website

Social media: impressions and (new) followers, using tools like Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights

Number of downloads for offered white papers, videos, infographics etc.

Qualitatively measuring PR results

Since PR efforts generally don’t (have to) result in direct conversions, keeping score of quantitative metrics will only get you so far. Practicing PR is literally more about building quality relations with your target audience and stakeholders, and you should incorporate this into your analysis accordingly. In addition to the aforementioned quantitative statistics, and again following the Barcelona Principles, media measurement should account for the quality of the media coverage, including but not limited to:

Tone

Credibility and relevance of key message delivery

Third-party or company spokesperson quotes

Prominence as relevant to the medium

Scores on measures like these can of course be negative as well as positive (or neutral). You may want to assign numerical scores on scales from 1-5 or 1-10 to facilitate comparisons between campaigns, channels or time periods.

The same goes for social media coverage. Being a trending topic on Twitter is one thing, but if it’s because you’re being ridiculed or criticized, it is of no – positive – value to you at all. Fortunately, there are many social media monitoring tools to track both quantitative metrics and sentiment. It’s exactly this combination of hard and soft data that will help you make sense of your PR efforts’ success. Comparing results through campaigns and time will ultimately enable you to predict future outcomes and adjust your strategy accordingly.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Blog,ROI,newsMon, 06 Nov 2017 09:42:00 -0600How to not get published!https://www.presspage.com/news/how-to-not-get-published/
https://www.presspage.com/news/how-to-not-get-published/10 ways to make sure your content will be ignoredWhen you are writing a blog post or press release, your aim is to reach your target audience. Sending a press release to journalists or submitting a blog post to an external website are great ways to reach new members in your target audience. That is, when you actually want to get the word out there. Do you want to make sure your content does not get published? Try these 10 effective ways to ensure your content will be ignored by journalists and bloggers.
]]>1. Underestimate your audience

A great way to make sure your audience and journalists will not want to read your content, is by underestimating them. Providing information that your audience will likely know, explaining the obvious or straight out belittling your reader will ensure your content will be put away. Never treat your reader or viewer as an equal. Don’t only provide context and clarification where needed, going overboard with your explanations will drive your audience away quite successfully.

2. Don’t understand the preferences of your audience

Is your audience mostly consuming content quickly and on their mobile devices, or do they prefer to read long form content on paper while enjoying a relaxed morning coffee? That makes quite the difference in format, tone, length, subject and medium you may choose to use. To make sure your content will not be consumed, ignore all information you might be able to gather on the audience's preferences. Do not segment your target audience to get to know the preferences of each segment separately, you will risk creating content in ways your target audience wants to consume!

3. Don’t adhere to the style and guidelines of the media outlet you are sending your content to

When you are sending out a press release to journalists or a guest blog to an external website, do not follow to the style and guidelines of the media outlet you are approaching. Running a website, magazine, newspaper or show costs quite some time and journalists are usually quite swamped already. If you want to be sure your content will be ignored, offer them content that needs a whole lot of work before it can be published to their outlets. Sure thing, they will not invest the time to change the content to meet the needs of the media outlet they are working for.

4. Don’t use sources to back up your claims

Bold claims and provocative headlines are successful ways to create interesting and compelling content. There is, however, a great way to undermine these efforts and drive readers away instantly. Do not back up any of your claims with sources. Create an atmosphere in which it is difficult to follow and believe your claims, and make it difficult to check any of your statements. This ensures you will come across as untrustworthy and dodgy.

5. Miss your deadline (and don’t communicate about it beforehand)

Journalists, bloggers, and producers work on tight time schedules. When a piece of content is being expected, it is unforgivable when the deadline is being missed. Especially when this has not been communicated beforehand (and timely). Miss your deadline and don’t communicate about it, it will surely get you shunned from this media outlet!

Image source: 6 Data-Driven Strategies to Get Your Content Published on Influential Sites

6. Write promotional content only

Most platforms don’t post promotional content unless it is being paid for. A great way to make sure your content is being ignored, is by creating promotional content only. Do not provide valuable insights, do not dig deeper into the subject and do not elevate from a promotional piece to ensure your content will be tossed by journalists and your audience.

7. Don’t use an understandable structure for your content

A start, middle and end to a piece of content is completely dispensable when you are trying not to get published. Paragraphs that address one clearly defined subject that relates to the other paragraphs, title and overall subject is totally overrated when trying not to reach your audience and get journalists to publish your content. Stay away from sub headers, bulleted lists, images, white space and a clearly defined structure of your article.

8. Don’t use a headline that introduces the content of the article

Always use a headline that has no apparent relation to the subject and discussed elements in the piece of content. Make sure your audience is confused when reading the headline and article. This way it is easy for journalists and other readers to ignore your content.

9. Create content that is superficial and unoriginal

With the internet being filled with innumerable pieces of content, a great way to be ignored is to create content that is superficial and unoriginal. Content that has no new angle, insight or information adds no value at all to a journalist or reader. Repeating existing content, insights and claims without adding any value is a foolproof way to guarantee your content will not be published.

10. Argue about feedback or suggested revisions in your piece

When you, despite all of our tips, found a journalist or blogger who wants to publish your content, there is one final way to assure this will not happen. More often than not, journalists and bloggers will provide feedback on guest posts and press releases. If you want to be positive your content gets rejected, handle the feedback like an angry teenager; be negative, don’t accept the feedback, don’t respect the authority the journalist or blogger has, communicate aggressively, show no signs of understanding and compassion, and by all means make sure they know you feel attacked. Chances are this is the first and last time you will cooperate with this journalist or blogger.

So, how to not get published?

Obviously we mean none of what we say above. In fact, if you do want to get published in the media (despite all of our valuable advice), then reverse the tips we mentioned. The best tip is to focus on who you are communicating with. You are not writing for yourself, your brand or your business objectives – you are writing for your audience. Keep that in mind and you will surely create content your audience wants to consume! What are your best tips to ensure getting published and read?

Sources:

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,contentSat, 04 Nov 2017 07:57:00 -05005 reasons to work at PressPagehttps://www.presspage.com/news/5-reasons-to-work-at-presspage/
https://www.presspage.com/news/5-reasons-to-work-at-presspage/Innovative, vibrant, why are you not working here?All employers may claim ‘we offer a great spot to work with amazing colleagues and interesting brands’. PressPage, however, lives up to it. There are numerous reasons to apply for a job at PressPage, we narrowed it down to the top five. Scroll all the way down to see the open positions we have right now.
]]>Innovative product and service

We think our product is amazing and we work very hard to keep it that way. We offer a software platform for PR professionals that provides an integrated, easy to use and modern social newsroom solution. We are passionate about PR, social and software. The product is setting the industry standard in usability and we are continuously developing new features and enhanced functionality to make sure it exceeds the expectations of our clients. Speaking of clients, they are our true main focus. Our pro-active Customer Success team ensures our clients get the best results from their digital PR efforts. Our Development team leaves no stone unturned in making sure the platform is second to none and future proofs the workflow and ROI of many PR teams. And finally, a Sales team that works more like seasoned PR workflow consultants than order takers.

Great brands

Every day we are delighted to work with the most amazing brands and their PR teams. Well-known organizations and global brands trust their online PR efforts on PressPage, and we are proud to serve them. We deal with the top brands in aviation, automotive, education, healthcare, luxury goods, government, construction and many more industries. Take a look atsome of the great newsroomswe empower that include the likes of KLM, Epicor, Porsche, Colliers International and TransUnion.

The best thing, we have a great relationship with our clients. We get to know the big brands and the smaller organizations thoroughly during the onboarding process. By getting to know the PR professionals working for these organizations personally, it is a joy to continue working with them when their newsrooms are up and running.

Nice atmosphere

A young, ambitious and fun atmosphere is what sets us apart. Growing from a start-up to scale-up, a self starting attitude and ambitious mindset are what keeps us going. Our team consists of great specialists and amazing all rounders that get the job done. We are also keen on having fun, making jokes, playing office ping pong contests and our weekly Friday drinks. Because being in an office all day is only as much fun as you make it!

Amazing team

Just listen toMarcus Lemonis, the incredibly successful entrepreneur: "You need to have the people, process and product in place. To make a business successful, people are the most important." We have those amazing people working here. Great specialists and amazing all rounders, organized colleagues and flexible team mates, we are trying to make use of the best qualities our colleagues have to offer. We have some outgoing colleagues that bring life to the office, and some introverts who can crack an unexpected joke too. Our team outings are the best, and that’s mostly due to the awesome people who work here.

Room to grow and develop

Growing from a start-up to a scale-up offers many possibilities to grow within the company and develop yourself within your role. There is always room to improve internal processes, to pick up a project, or to expand your responsibilities. With a young and driven team like ours, growing is inevitable. We are continuously learning and developing ourselves to make sure we deliver the best service to our clients. We are challenging ourselves and each other to develop and learn. This way we can stay on top of the game while staying as flexible as we are.

Are you curious to see if you would fit in our team? Here are some of the open positions we have available right now:

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,teamWed, 25 Oct 2017 05:15:00 -0500The challenges PR professionals facehttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-challenges-pr-professionals-face/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-challenges-pr-professionals-face/The daily struggle to get the right story out therePR is no easy job to handle. It never has been, but due to the rise of the Internet and social media, it seems to have become increasingly challenging to get the right story to the right people. Of course Public Relations is an amazing field to work in, but there are some tough challenges PR professionals face almost daily. We gathered our biggest challenges, what are yours?
]]>Credibility & reputation management

Nowadays, anything and everything can be researched online, so make sure you are upfront and honest when putting out a statement. Also, anyone can publish a piece of content online targeting your organization. This may be a negative product review, a dissatisfied employee or a stakeholder that inadvertently leaks the news. Credibility is critical for organizations, and for PR professionals even more so. Without credibility the message you want to send will not be read and shared, and once damaged, it is difficult to restore your reputation. Always think about the risk of reputation loss when getting your message out.

Choosing the right channels

Blogs, vlogs, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. There are so many channels online to use, as well as all the traditional channels to choose from. How do you pick the right channels? What message should go on what channel and why? Unfortunately there is no easy answer to these questions. Every target group has different preferences and every message may be in need of a certain format or platform. Before you create content or a press release, think about the goal you are trying to achieve with your message. Which target group fits with this goal, where can you find this target audience, and what are their preferences concerning content consumption? Is there a certain channel that performs well with this type of content? By asking these critical questions before choosing a format, you are able to tailor the message and medium to a certain channel which may boost the results of your efforts.

Measuring impact

With online data on the rise, the cry for measurable results has become louder. Additionally, PR professionals face the question to provide ROI on their efforts more often. This requires a new mindset when reaching out to journalists and creating content for different channels.

Before you start, you need to identify the goal you are trying to reach and the metrics you are going to use to measure your results. A clear, concrete and measurable goal should be the start. In most cases, your goal will inspire the metrics. If you are trying to reach a certain amount of people in a target group you can use this as inspiration for your metrics.

Next you should be able to pinpoint the target audience, format, structure and distribution channels. When you send out your message, start to gather data immediately. Perhaps you can adjust some details to push your message and improve the results.

Crisis management

A crisis is inevitable. Your organization can get hit by a natural disaster, some negative news may spiral out of control or the company has some financial challenges that sparks media coverage. Moments of crisis can be incredibly stressful and a lot is usually asked of the PR and communications teams during this times.

To make sure you can get through a crisis as best as you can, it is vital to prepare for it. Communication is key during a crisis – knowing where and how to communicate is essential to your strategy. Make sure you have a protocol in place that will guide you through the crisis and reflect afterwards to improve your current protocol.

Time management

Time management is a critical component of every job, the PR professional is no exception. With tight deadlines, many interests at stake, and news getting out 24/7, PR professionals have a lot to deal with. To stay on top of all the tasks you need to take care of, make sure you manage your time by creating overviews and priorities. Schedule your tasks in a calendar, estimate how long tasks will take and plan them in accordingly. Create a daily to do list and make sure you know what to prioritize. Train yourself to get as organized as possible to make sure you don’t lose your head when the stress hits.

Get on top!

The daily struggles to get everything done in the right way is a normal part of the job. Get on top of it by using handy tools, overviews and channels to structure and communicate your efforts. By cooperating with colleagues and using best practices of your peers, you should be able to tackle any challenge. Take some time to review your workflows to see where you are able to improve, prepare or delegate to make sure you spend your time wisely.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,crisis,roiTue, 24 Oct 2017 08:00:00 -0500Five questions to ask yourself before sending out a press releasehttps://www.presspage.com/news/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-sending-out-a-press-release/
https://www.presspage.com/news/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-sending-out-a-press-release/Are you sending out the best content?Sending out press releases is still a big part of public relations. Even though the PR landscape has changed over the past two decades, mainly due to the internet, press releases still prove their value. That is, when your press release is worth reading. How do you make sure your press release is the best piece of content you can send out? Simply ask yourself these five questions to see if your release is in need of improvement.
]]>1. Did I include all information needed to release this to the news wires?

Journalists are constantly working on tight deadlines. They hardly ever have the time to search for missing information when receiving a potentially interesting press release. Make sure you include all required information, that your release is easy to read and there is no duplicate information. To make sure you meet all the specs, tick off the items on the list below before sending your release to the news wires.

Clearly state that you are sending a press release when you are using a direct email address

Include a clear headline which touches upon the newsworthy subject of your release

Provide the date and location of the event or news. Include ‘Under embargo’ when the news cannot be published before a certain date

Make sure you state all the facts in the first paragraph: who, what, where, why, when and how?

Use quotes to support your message or claims. Make sure you state who you are quoting and why this person is important by stating the role of the individual

Include visuals and downloads in your release and state the copyright information.Try to avoid sending press releases without any pictures

Provide contact details of the contact person for journalists, and make it easy for a journalist to reach you if they have any further questions

Add a boilerplate which covers the most important information about your company, such as the services you provide, the location, your website, core products or services, and employees, etc.

2. Is there a way to personalize the content?

Personalization drives the results of your content. Is there a way you can personalize the content or the accompanying message of your press release? You could think of including an internal expert on the matter and use a quote of this colleague in your press release. Writing in the third person is still the way to go for press releases, but this may create a distance to your reader. Make sure you write the release from the premise that an actual person will read this.

When sending the press release, think of how you can segment the people you are sending it to. Can you divide the people into smaller groups and use shared characteristics to personalize the message you are sending? We will get back to this later on, but do think about segmentation early on to connect the press release to the journalists you will send the piece to.

3. Is all the information included in the press release correct?

Usually, press releases contain information like dates, places and names. Make sure you double check if the information is correct before sending out your release to avoid any mistakes. Also double check the company information and links that are included in the press release. Are the contact details and web links the right ones for this particular release or journalist? When using quotes and sources, make sure you check if the information is correct and used in the right context.

4. Did I use a readable and understandable format?

A press release has a particular format that makes it easy to digest the information offered and find relevant bits to use for an article. Respect this format and present the information of your release in a readable and comprehensible way. Make sure your release is short and easy to read. Use paragraphs to break up text and include subheadings. Always include multimedia and provide, if possible, a link to where the multimedia can be downloaded from. And make sure you can tick off all the items for the news wires.

5. Am I targeting the right people in the right way?

As always, it is important to ask yourself who are you targeting, why, and how. When reaching out, always think of what platforms and media your target audiences are using. Are the journalists you are approaching using the same platforms and media?

If you are trying to reach multiple journalists and platforms, consider segmentation. Are there ways to split up the group of journalists and platforms into smaller groups with shared characteristics? Think of location, industry, subjects they cover and audiences they target. Use this information to tailor the press release and accompanying message to their personal interests and preferences. Personalize your approach as much as possible by adjusting the press release, medium you use to reach out, call to action and accompanying message to send the press release with.

Timing is also very important. Are you reaching out at the right time to gather momentum for this release and are you aware of the timing preferences of the journalists you are contacting? Take this into account before sending out your message. Finally, shareability is key. Make it easy for journalists to share your message and content. Post the release to your website and include share links, and make the press release interesting enough to share.

Send it out!

When you have ticked all the boxes, it is time to send out your press release. What happens next? Possibly, your release will get some media coverage or the message will be read on your own channels. Tracking the results of your efforts is a great way to see what you could improve for upcoming press releases. Think of metrics to use and goals to achieve with this press release. Are you able to define some measurable elements? Keep track of the performance of your message using the predefined metrics and use the insight you gather for new content. This way you can continuously improve and increase the chances of getting press coverage and traction.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,press releaseTue, 17 Oct 2017 08:00:00 -0500Infographic: Challenges PR professionals facehttps://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-challenges-pr-professionals-face/
https://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-challenges-pr-professionals-face/Here you will find our latest infographic. Using infographics can help you gain more traffic. The PressPage platform allows you to easily embed infographic, 'pin' these straight away into your Pinterest account and it will be included in your media library. Interested in learning more about how to use infographics in your newsroom? Check out our our media library to see more infographics or try out PressPage for 14-days to see how it can work for you.
]]>This infographic is about the challenges PR professionals face. What are your main challenges in public relations?
]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,infographicThu, 12 Oct 2017 12:00:00 -0500Travel to Curacao Tourist Board's online newsroom increased 180%https://www.presspage.com/news/curacao-tourist-board-tells-their-story/
https://www.presspage.com/news/curacao-tourist-board-tells-their-story/How a social newsroom led to spiking traffic and decreasing costs.If you think about white beaches, lovely weather and friendly people, there is a big chance Curacao will pop up in your mind. Curacao Tourist Board is the organization that is responsible for promoting this destination to potential visitors throughout the world. By using the PressPage platform, they have a beautiful home for their stories.
]]>We spoke with Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board about his role and responsibilities and the results they have achieved by using PressPage to tell the ‘Curacao story.’

Promoting the beautiful destination

Although Curacao is a well known holiday destination, there is always work to be done. Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board: “When I started in my current role, we felt like we needed to transition our marketing efforts more towards what the trend is nowadays: digital and inbound marketing.” In his role, he is responsible for the overall awareness of the location online, inbound traffic, social media, SEO, and content marketing. Along with their local office, Curacao Tourist Board also has overseas offices in The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Australia, United States, and Canada. While the global strategy is created in the head office in Curacao, each individual office is responsible for creating tactics to best execute this strategy in their particular region.

The primary focus of their Marketing and Public Relations efforts is branding and awareness of the holiday destination. By creating individual campaigns for the regions, they try to reach their target audience: people within the age of 25 to 65, middle to upper income and in their target markets. Harms explains: “For example, in June we have set up a storytelling campaign, encouraging people who have visited Curacao to share their story. We hope to generate curiosity and desire among people who are thinking about visiting Curacao.” Every campaign uses the channels that suit the topic and the target audience best. For example, currently, they are targeting people in Chicago via a mobile campaign.

A home for their stories

Before Curacao Tourist Board was using PressPage, they were already publishing content via social media. However, this was content from sources other than their own, therefore it did not link back to their website. Because their audience was not visiting their website, they would often miss out on valuable information about Curacao. Harms explains that “during a social media event in Chicago, I got in touch with PressPage. After the demo, I was convinced. In particular, the SEO options and storytelling features captured my attention. When I saw the logos of their other clients on their website, we definitely knew PressPage was a good fit for us.”

From that point on, the whole process went quite fast. Harms worked on the procurement together with his IT colleague and the PressPage team. “It all went well. Some things took a little longer than expected but that was due to the two different platforms we were working on.” All in all, the whole implementation process went faster than they anticipated.

With PressPage, they now have a good content home that allows them to publish their stories to an even wider audience. “Publishing stories is really easy – the platform is extremely user-friendly. You just copy-paste your text into a release in the newsroom.” When they ran into some problems with their social channels (due to the transition from their Facebook account into a business account), one call with their Customer Success Manager at PressPage was enough to fix the problem.

More traffic and less costs

Looking at the total picture and comparing it to the situation before, Curacao Tourist Board has achieved some tremendous results. Since they started using PressPage, their referral traffic from the newsroom to their website has increased more than 100%. Harms says, “something that we are really proud of is that the newsroom appears as number 7 in our top 10 list of traffic sources. I am more than happy with that.”

What’s next to come?

Promoting the experiences of visitors to the island is something that Curacao Tourist Board is eager to do. Harms says, “we are about to launch an experience tourism campaign. We plan to share videos of visitors recounting their experiences in Curacao.” The PressPage platform enables them to tell these stories while driving inbound traffic back to their website.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,news,newclient,cases,CaseFri, 06 Oct 2017 04:00:00 -0500What is SaaShttps://www.presspage.com/news/what-is-saas/
https://www.presspage.com/news/what-is-saas/Software as a Service - What it is and is notSaaS companies are on the rise and an increasing amount of people recognize the value of SaaS. But what does that mean? What is Software as a Service and what can you expect from a SaaS company?
]]>Software as a Service explained

Most of us use software on a daily basis. For a long time it was common to buy a cd-rom or dvd which contained the software you purchased, which you would install onto your computer. Updates could be purchased by buying a new version or downloading updates from the company website. When apps were introduced, this changed a bit. Unfortunately apps still require to be installed and updated locally, and that uses up storage on your device. Open source systems also require storage, and they need to be managed by IT. With Software as a Service, all this is becoming a thing of the past.

“The SaaS concept provides you with the use of the software on a subscription basis, and the application resides elsewhere. [...] That “elsewhere” has become popularly known as the cloud.” Source: SaaS for Dummies

Software as a Service is accessible on demand, in the cloud. The software is obtained through licensing rather than a purchase. The SaaS company provides:

the software, the updates

the network

The servers

The operating systems

Storage

ensures you can use the latest software any time, any place

There is no need to have a degree in IT anymore to implement new software – all the technical details are taken care of by the SaaS company.The biggest advantages, especially for companies, are that the software can be used on multiple devices from anywhere in the world, it is accessible online, there is no installation required, and the software is always up to date. Instead of investing a large sum of money to purchase new software, you pay a subscription fee for the services you actually use. Many SaaS solutions offer a free trial and supplemental apps to ensure an integrated use of the software.

What can you expect from a SaaS company?

The advantages of the SaaS software solutions are quite clear, with the main advantage being that it is easy to use, maintain and implement. But that is just one part of the equation. The other part, the human touch, is also quite important. What does a SaaS company do for a client?

The first point of contact with a business is usually through sales. Most SaaS companies go about their sales strategies differently. An open and direct conversation, and zooming in on the issue you as a client may have, are key in the sales strategy. Sales Representatives are developing more and more into consultants and researchers that connect with possible clients, with a great understanding of the market they are operating in and the challenges that prospects face. They know the service they provide to a T and connect with people that would really benefit from their software solution. Providing a free trial, investing in proper demo meetings and brainstorming with a prospect to find a solution that suits them is the way to go. Whenever a prospect turns into a customer, the Sales Representative provides the dedicated Customer Success Manager with the necessary information to enter the onboarding process.

Most SaaS companies have a dedicated Client Service or Customer Success team. They are the link between the customer and internal departments, mostly development. When a new client comes in, the Customer Success Manager is responsible for the onboarding process, ensuring the software is implemented correctly, and that the customer knows how to handle the software. Most importantly, the Customer Success Manager proactively thinks of ways the client could use the software to its full potential. When the software is up and running, Customer Success Managers will provide customer support and offer in-depth information about the software to their clients. They are the main point of contact with clients and have great insight in what is working well, what needs are not being met and what developments are in demand. They will communicate these needs to development and update clients on support tickets they have requested.

Since SaaS is centered around software, a great development team is indispensable. Development focuses on keeping the software running properly, providing regular updates, and thinking of ways to improve the software and user experience. Most SaaS companies provide a software solution ‘off the shelf’. There might be different options based on company size, industry or preference, but the solution is being bought as is. Development teams within SaaS companies are working on improving and updating the software for all users, therefore custom work is rarely part of the deal. The upside is that with the development team continuously working to stay on top of trends, every feature on the platform is up to date, ensuring that customers always have a cutting edge software solution.

What doesn’t a SaaS company do?

A SaaS company usually offers one or more ‘off the shelf’ software solutions. This means custom work is not included, or is considered an added service. Here at Presspage, whenever a new client signs up, our Customer Success team is devoted to getting the newsroom up and running within the style of the client’s company website and using all the features the client needs. This means we will create a newsroom template (or design layer) based on the live website of the client, we style the modules according to the look & feel of the corporate website, and help set up the layout of the newsroom. What our clients find really useful, is that they are able to customize the platform themselves by simply turning modules on and off.

We don’t create a whole new design for a website or web page, create a custom content management system, or create new apps and modules. We are, however, always open for suggestions and rely on client input to prioritize updates and additions to our platform.

Why choose a SaaS company?

Are you looking into purchasing new software? Then you are most likely running into several SaaS solutions. Why should you consider a SaaS company?

First and foremost, SaaS companies take the full responsibility of the technical details of the software – you don’t need elaborate technical knowledge or resources to use it.

Secondly, most SaaS solutions are up to date and easy to use. SaaS solutions rely on the subscriptions of happy customers, so we try our hardest to keep you happy.

Lastly, the SaaS mindset is usually centered around a proactive approach to clients and prospects. This means sales does research on prospects and offers valuable insights while looking for a potential fit, customer success helps customers to get the most out of the software, and development is focused on evolving the platform to make sure it exceeds the expectations of our clients. SaaS is a very flexible and client oriented way of doing business.

In conclusion, SaaS creates new opportunities and a different kind of relationship between vendors and customers that benefits both sides. At PressPage, we are constantly evolving the different aspects of our SaaS model to make sure we offer our customers the desired service and experience.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,NewsTue, 03 Oct 2017 08:00:00 -0500Development Report Q3 2017https://www.presspage.com/news/development-report-q3-2017/
https://www.presspage.com/news/development-report-q3-2017/Lots of new updates & featuresWhile the second quarter of 2017 was primarily about new APIs and work on the backend of our platform, this quarter we worked on both distribution in the backend and quite a sum of updates that are visible on the frontend. Below you will find the new developments and features we are excited to share, divided into three categories: Newsroom, Cases and Media.
]]>Newsroom

The main element of our platform is of course the newsroom. To support our current and new customers better, the following updates have been made:

New Countries added:Mexico and Argentina (Spanish) are now available in the Language/Country selection in the Manager.

Mail campaign composer:Summary and subtitle are now automatically taken over from a selected release in the Email campaign composer.

Mobile version deprecated:The Mobile version feature has been deprecated as this feature was outdated and didn't support all modules. All Newsroom templates that didn't support a responsive layout are now converted to a fancy responsive design allowing more flexibility and module support.

Cases

With more and more cases being uploaded in the newsrooms, the Cases section of our platform is of equal importance level to the newsroom. These updates have been made to improve your experience with our platform:

Case overview performance update:The Case overview page received a major performance update which makes searching and scrolling through cases a lot faster and a more enjoyable experience.

Translation support:We now support the standard localization format XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) to support creating cases from translation files. This will make creating multilingual cases a walk in the park. In a follow up story we will tell you more details about XLIFF.

Publish Notifications:An option to send out a message to a selection of Users of the Account. This will allow you to notify other platform Users that a draft is ready for review and publication.

Multiple Flickr and Search modules:Users can now add multiple Flickr widgets and Search modules to a Release or Newsroom.

Google Meta Module:Users now have the option to add specific Metadata to any case allowing Google News to better classify your content.

Media

Incorporating media assets directly in your press releases has become the standard, therefore we have optimized our Media section to enable you to easily create a rich media release. Recent updates include:

Media Manager:The Media Manager now shows if items are published to the Media Library by showing a simple icon indicator

Mass Copy Image module:Users can now mass copy Image modules to other selected languages. A new module can be created or an existing one can be overwritten.

Want to stay on top of the latest developments? Be sure to check the roadmap in the main PressPage Manager menu (top-right corner) for upcoming functionalities!

]]>News,developmentMon, 02 Oct 2017 08:00:00 -0500Infographic: Virtual Realityhttps://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-virtual-reality/
https://www.presspage.com/news/infographic-virtual-reality/Here you will find our latest infographic. Using infographics can help you gain more traffic. The PressPage platform allows you to easily embed infographic, 'pin' these straight away into your Pinterest account and it will be included in your media library. Interested in learning more about how to use infographics in your newsroom? Check out our our media library to see more infographics or try out PressPage for 14-days to see how it can work for you.
]]>This infographic is about virtual reality. Here are six reasons to implement Virtual Reality into your PR strategy.
]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,infographicWed, 27 Sep 2017 17:00:00 -0500How OhioHealth increased their newsroom coverage by 889% in one year - Part 2https://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year-2/
https://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year-2/The healthcare organization's editorial philosophy and communications workflow is a stellar example of how to run your organization's online newsroom. Two years ago, OhioHealth, a not-for-profit, faith-based healthcare system in Ohio, switched their newsroom over to PressPage. Within the first year, their total viewership jumped from11,588 visits in 2015 to 114,697 visitsthe next full year on their new PressPage newsroom. That is a meteoric 889% increase!

(NOTE: This is part 2 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can readpart 1 here.)​

]]>While we would love to say our platform empowered OhioHealth to achieve such numbers, part of the secret lies in the way their team restructured their PR workflow and the subsequent editorial philosophy they adopted for their newsroom.

Finding traditional news media harder and harder to reach in the modern age, OhioHealth saw an opportunity to showcase their internal communications stories alongside their media relations efforts to truly create a one stop shop brand journalism website. We spoke toMissy Gleason, the managing editor of the OhioHealth Newsroom, andMark Hopkins, director of Media Relations to learn their secrets.

Last time we spoke about your content strategy. Let's talk about your communications workflow. Did anything change when you adopted the newsroom?

Mark Hopkins:Before we had the newsroom, the media relations team at OhioHealth would go out and find their stories, the internal communications team would be working on their stories, and social media would do their own thing. And there might be other departments here that might be working on something that we didn’t know about. And we would hear about it later and say: "That’s a great story. We should do that!" or "We’re both working on the same story. What are we doing?"

Missy Gleason: Yes and you could have an events team working on a video that the communications team wasalready planning to write a story on. Then somebody in the media team might even be thinking of pitching it, and those three teams not realizing that those things were going on.

Mark: And so Missy founded aContent Councilthat we’ve been doing for acouple of years now. We’re a big organization and when you don't have that communication between the different departments, even though you’re friends and you work in the same building, if you don’t purposefully sit down and share what you do, then you lose opportunities. And you may be duplicating each other’s work. So that helped a ton. And social media also sits at that table. There’s an energy that forms – an excitement.

Missy: I see a lot more people coming to us now saying “this would be good for the newsroom”, because it's now much more top of mind for everyone. We even have clinicians who know to reach out to us when something newsworthy is happening, or even if they’re not sure if it’s newsworthy.

How has your social media strategy evolved as a result of these changes?

Missy:The social media team and I have a phone call every Tuesday and Thursday morning. We call itour ‘What’s trending call’. We just jump on the phone together and talk about what’s making news. Even if it’s something we’re not involved in. We also talk about what’s being shared on social channels. And then we talk about what could we be creating, to jump on the ‘news wagon’.

I think having me on that call with the social media team is so key because I have that legacy information of what we have done news stories on in the past. So if something comes around, let’s say this summer a case of cryptosporidiosis breaks out at the pools, I can say "we did a news story on that last summer, you can bring it back and share it again". Because such a big part of social media is not just sharing what’s brand new, but bringing back things that are still topical and timely, that might have been created one or two years ago.

And do you find yourself creating content that has a quality of timelessness or at least some longevity to it?

Missy: Oh yeah we do. Obviously, a part of a news organization is being timely, but you also want that mixture of evergreen stories that are going to beneficial to your audience no matter where they are or when they are.

So it sounds like you’re thinking about content a lot more proactively, looking for opportunities, rather than reacting to events once they have already passed.

Missy: Absolutely. Yes, we’re definitely much more proactive. When we meet as a content council weusually touch very briefly on what has happened. And then the rest of the meeting is what is coming up. And then we usually look 2-3 months ahead and brainstorm and think of things that we could capitalize on, and what should be a story coming up in the next 2-3 months. It provides a great opportunity for everybody to stop and think about what could be a story, as opposed to ‘well this is what we’re already doing’. It’s just a great brainstorming place.

Has that been a deliberate strategy on your end, to look at every piece of content on the home page, and make sure everything has a purpose?

Missy:Absolutely. I definitely take into consideration not just what the photos are, but what the newscontent is. When I look at the slider at the top - I think: "Is the visual compelling?" and "Is this really something that should have that top half of the real estate?" It might be a pretty picture but if the story doesn’t promote viewer benefit in some way, then it won’t make that slider. And we really try to stay away from news that we’re sharing just for the sake of–

Mark (laughs):–because people in our organization want us to? We hold the line pretty well.

Missy: We really take that editorial role seriously. We don’t want it to be a page where it’s just us pounding our chest and saying how wonderful we are, but really demonstrating our value and what we provide to our community.

Are there any specific features of PressPage where you think you’ve discovered a trick or a strategy that has helped you?

Missy:One of the features I like is the featured release module. We used that for a long time last yearwhen Zika was in the news. We kept a running story about Zika in our community and kept updating the featured release with the latest news. So when someone came to the newsroom, they could see, “Oh, OhioHealth has a story right here on what central Ohioans need to know about Zika.” So people knew the featured release wasn’t going away or phasing out, which I really appreciated because Zika was something that lasted for longer than a season.

If you could give one piece of advice to communications professionals looking to match your team's success, what would it be?

Missy: I would say step away from your desk and think about how you absorb news as an audiencemember. When you are looking to read something, or something stops your scroll on Facebook, think about what grabs your attention there. And really focus on that aspect – what do you want to know as a viewer, or reader, as opposed to what does my institution want me to share.

Mark: And I would add – harness the power and thinking of those around you. I think if you run it as anisland, you are going to be limited. But if you share what it is with the other people in the organization and get them excited about it too, they’ll help you come up with ideas, and make you aware of other stories. So I’d say collaboration – something like the content council is ultimately going to help.

(NOTE: This is part 2 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can read part 1 here.)

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,client,ohiohealth,healthcareTue, 26 Sep 2017 08:00:00 -0500PR in the age of Artificial Intelligencehttps://www.presspage.com/news/artificial-intelligence-and-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/artificial-intelligence-and-pr/ What you need to knowAccording to Google, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is “the intelligence exhibited by machines or software”. Though AI is often associated with dystopic sci-fi visions of the future (thinkThe Matrix), its presence has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. We already welcome AI into our homes with Amazon’sAlexa,and into our palms with Apple’sSiri.In essence, AI is a computer, software or algorithm that is able to display characteristics associated with intelligence, including thinking, learning, predicting, or actually working.
]]>How has AI affected PR?

In the world of public relations, artificial intelligence has had a tempered (though growing) effect. While content publication and distribution have been automated for years, previously human-owned orcreativeactivities have seen a rise in the use of automated technologies. For example,Associated Press (AP) has implemented AI technologyto produce all earnings reports.Tech companies are designing AIthat produces outbound content, including press releases, product descriptions, email outreaches etc. While these activities are in their early stages, and can largely be differentiated from human-produced content, machines are now able to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to produce unique and insightful prose in mere seconds.

So far these primitive AI tools requirestructured datato create insights; that is, data with a high degree of organization, a predefined set of rules, that is readily searchable through search engine algorithms or other search operations. Yet in the near future, cognitive computing will be able to harness the power ofstructuredandunstructureddata by analyzing and producing information in novel ways.

But is AI a threat to PR jobs?

Whether machines will replace humans in the workforce is a topic that dominates thecultural and economic zeitgeist in 2017. Though there is little doubt that automation will replace blue-collar jobs such as driving, how it will affect knowledge based, white-collar jobs such as public relations remains unclear.

The often cited argument is that while machines will do the laborious and administrative parts of PR work, AI will in fact free up the public relations professional to do work which requires the distinct human qualities ofcreativityandempathy.

McKinsey research reinforces this idea: “the hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work.” In the PR professionals world this would encompass devising communications strategies, building relationships with journalists, and producing content.

Yet there are some glaring (and perhaps self-deluding) flaws in such arguments. The question of automation is about when, not if, it will happen.

AI is already here, doing our jobs

First, machines are already far superior to humans, in certain areas, in analyzing short and long-term trends, and devising algorithm based techniques to achieve strategic goals. It is conceivable that software in the future is capable of monitoring data on the internet, evaluating emotions and opinions, and consolidating the information intonaturallanguage with the highest probability of influencing audiences.

Second, we overestimate the power of thehuman touch. Sure, you may prefer speaking to a human over a robot customer service representative now - but these technologies are still currently in their early developmental orclunkyphase. Once technologies improve their natural language processing, and algorithms become more powerful, it will become difficult to differentiate human interactions from those with machines.

In fact, research done byHubspotreveals that “when given the scenario, 57% of respondents were interested in getting real-time answers from chatbots on a company website”. Perhaps the most damning news to human PR is this: “when we asked respondents if they had a preference for who should help them in a service setting, 40% didn't care if they were helped by a person or AI tool”. With their capacity to provide instantaneous, round-the-clock service on social networks, websites, and messaging applications, organizations will increasingly lean on machine based PR tools.

Lastly, with growing capabilities in machine learning technologies, AI is already dispelling the notion of an ethereal human quality of ‘creativity’. Machines are now competing against, and beating humans at some of our most cherished artistic endeavours such asmusicandart.

Where to from here?

It is argued that artificial intelligence, like all information technology, is undergoing exponential growth. The most ambitious estimates predict that AI will outperform humans in most jobs within the next 20 years. Considering that Facebook started 14 years ago, this really isn’t far away.

Where then, does this leave us? For public relations (indeed for most occupations), this is a significant existential question. While it is difficult to predict the outcome, it will be important for PR professionals to remain vigilant of emerging technologies, and to identify opportunities to work alongside AI wherever they may appear. Whether that can be even be done in the long term remains a mystery.

Though AI will form a large part of the future of PR, there are othertrendsandtoolsto keep on top of. Learn how topersonalize your content, and to harness the power ofvideoandoffline contentto stay ahead of the game.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,AI,Artificial Intelligence,technologyTue, 19 Sep 2017 09:00:00 -0500Emergency communications in the era of social mediahttps://www.presspage.com/news/emergency-communications-in-the-era-of-social-media/
https://www.presspage.com/news/emergency-communications-in-the-era-of-social-media/Social media plays growing role in crisis communications: lessons from Harvey and Irma.According to the FCC, Harvey has disrupted at least 17 emergency call centers and 320 cellular sites, and it has caused outages for more than 148,000 Internet, TV, and phone customers. It is also reported that 9 radio stations went out of service. Emergency services, victims, local authorities and organizations turned to social media to stay connected.
]]>Hurricane Harvey was the first major Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the United States in 12 years. Since Wilma in 2005, no hurricanes have made landfall with such destructive power.

Harvey was the wettest tropical hurricane on record in the United States to date. In the four-day period it struck, it dropped more than 40 inches of rain in many places in the eastern Texas region.

Soon after Harvey, Irma, a second major Atlantic hurricane, caused widespread and catastrophic damage throughout parts of the northeastern Caribbean and the Florida Keys. The Cape Verde type hurricane was typed as the most intense since Dean in 2005.

Emergency communications go social

In order to be prepared for an emergency -- whether it is a fire, natural disaster or any other event -- many organizations have an emergency communications plan that often times does not yet include social channels.

Yet, according toCNN, hundreds of stranded Texans sought help by posting on Facebook and Twitter. They organized rescue missions through Facebook groups. And they posted harrowing pictures to emphasize just how high the flood waters were.

TheWall Street Journalreports on incidents of users taking the unusual step of sharing their full names and addresses across public channels like Facebook and Twitter. Even going as far as tagging news outlets, journalists and other prominent individuals in their social-media posts in hopes their messages would be shared widely and eventually answered.

Countering misinformation

However well-intentioned the social posts of people in distress and citizen journalists might be, sometimes they can be factually incorrect. Miami International Airport had to deal with a video of Mexico City's airport that on social was claimed to be at Miami International.

Mashable reported the misappropriated video was even retweeted by President Donald Trump's director of social media, Dan Scavino Jr.

The newsroom as emergency hub

At PressPage (provider of social newsrooms) we also noted a steep rise in emergency traffic on newsrooms of companies in the affected areas. Most of the traffic coming from mobile devices by means of social channels.

A social newsroom can play a key role in coherent and effective emergency communications. The visitor statistics above clearly indicate the spike in traffic to a newsroom as the winds and rains from Irma came to Georgia.

Pre- and post emergency communications

The statistics below clearly indicate the pre-hurricane pro-active communications efforts of an organization in the aviation industry, and how it picked up post-storm disaster recovery messaging to stakeholders.

The difference between unique and total amount of visitors indicates there is a large audience that frequently returns to the website looking for the latest updates.

Platform and channel agnostic publishing

A key aspect for successful communications during a crisis situation is the ability to publish single origin news messaging that stands out and catches attention on the main social channels. Additionally, the destination link should take readers to a platform agnostic page that renders well on mobile devices, (desktop) computers, and in all major browsers.

“Can’t connect to server”

So what happens when a crisis hits? Traffic to your newsroom is great, but a sudden influx of traffic that is too large, could crash your site.

An important aspect of newsroom infrastructure during an emergency is auto scaling. Auto scaling allows better availability of your newsroom during sudden spike traffic incidents. If configured correctly, it will launch instances in new geographical Availability Zones. In other words, if one physical server park is compromised, it will automatically switch to servers in a different geographical location. Additionally, and more commonly known, auto scaling ensures that your newsroom always has the right amount of capacity to handle the current traffic demands.

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail"

When a natural disaster occurs, organizations can build lasting trust with communities by being reliable purveyors of information, to warn, reassure and sometimes rescue their audiences in affected areas.

Yet many well-intentioned organizations miss this critical opportunity through the ‘that won’t happen to us’ mindset. If you wait until a crisis hits to ask whether your newsroom auto-scales, whether your audience knows where to reach you, or who makes up your crisis communication team, it is usually already too late.

Ultimately, whether you are a large organization in a metropolitan city, or a small mom and pop store in a rural area, the key difference between an effective and ineffective response to crises, usually ends up being the preparation you put in beforehand.

Download our white paper on how to prepare your newsroom for a crisis; presenting a systematic approach to a seamless and smarter crisis management, specified per phase:

Pre-crisis: How to prepare for when the unexpected happens.

During: How to systematically use your newsroom and leverage social channels to get the message out.

Post-crisis: the importance of SEO in the aftermath of a crisis.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,Emergency,Harvey,Irma,crisisMon, 18 Sep 2017 15:12:06 -0500VELUX: “We need a strong digital window to the world”https://www.presspage.com/news/velux-we-need-a-strong-digital-window-towards-the-world/
https://www.presspage.com/news/velux-we-need-a-strong-digital-window-towards-the-world/The VELUX Group is an international company headquartered in Denmark, manufacturing roof windows, modular skylights and accessories to create better living environments for their customers. With a presence in over 40 countries, it requires a future-focused PR platform that enables VELUX sales companies to convey effective and consistent messaging towards various stakeholders.
]]>We spoke to Kathrine Westermann and Carsten Suhr about the challenges theVELUX Groupencounters in the media landscape and how they use PressPage to overcome them.

A social media newsroom strengthening outreach

Sensing the rapidly changing media landscape, the VELUX corporate media relations team realized four years ago that they needed more than a traditional corporate newsroom to meet the future needs of their PR teams across markets.

In the future the VELUX Group would need one digital newsroom with the potential to work as a content hub journalists could pull press releases, images and videos from, but also a platform with social media were integrated, as they anticipated the disciplines would merge much more. Therefore the PressPage solution appeared as a new attractive platform.

The PressPage platform helped incorporate two central goals of the press department: press relations and increasing outreach through social media. The platform’s integration with social media has strengthened the Group’s reach, allowing them to turn their newsroom into a campaign hub from where they can launch content and bring traffic back to one single location. For Kathrine Westermann, “the newsroom is so much more in sync with how you do outreach today[…] It allows us to communicate on many channels, which is a big plus.”

A coherent global PR strategy

Although the VELUX Group started with just one newsroom for their corporate headquarter, today they run 14 individual VELUX newsrooms across Europe and North America using the PressPage platform. A significant factor in choosing PressPage was the coherent corporate branding that could be applied across their national newsrooms. Westermann explains “the newsroom reflects our brand and is completely in line with our corporate identity, our corporate website and our national marketing sites.” Using PressPage, each national team manages their content, while allowing the company to maintain a consistent brand message across each newsroom.

Westermann explains that they can now look at their overall global strategy, and easily decide to “boost their media performance in a specific country”. In fact, after the national offices in Poland, The Netherlands and France incorporated PressPage into their PR workflow, they recommended it to other sales regions within the VELUX Group.

PressPage as a Partner

Carsten Suhr, Senior Digital Business Strategy Manager at VELUX Group, was involved in the process of defining newsroom requirements and selecting a suitable newsroom platform.

“We are happy with the collaboration with PressPage. The feedback we provided during the onboarding and after the launch was taken seriously, and some requests they made have been turned into improvements of the platform.” Suhr notes “PressPage was a logic choice for us as a newsroom solution, but also in terms of attitude. We really liked the way PressPage looks at development and innovation.” PressPage relies heavily on the input of clients to prioritize developments and new features. The VELUX Group found this to be a great asset in the process.

Suhr goes on to explain, “for us, PressPage is a partner, not a vendor. It is not just about having a great newsroom, but it is also about good support in the roll-out of the newsroom and a high level of service. PressPage provides training and support to our media relations team who are the users of the platform. You don’t need your local web person to support your internal PR people; you have a dedicated PressPage support team that helps our staff around the clock”.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

For Westermann and Suhr, it was the platform’s flexibility and ease of use that made a big difference in the end. Their old content management system was laborious and unnecessarily complex, requiring the VELUX team to send press releases to an external vendor to publish on their behalf. Westermann explains that “in the long tendering process one of the most important points for us was to get full control of the editorial process.”

Using PressPage changed this, giving the media relations team full editorial power and the ability to decide what the content flow should be. They can edit releases in the newsroom instantly at any moment, without being dependent on external support.

Along with the ease of use, the editorial freedom also extends to analytics – the VELUX Group PR team no longer needs to dive into complex Google Analytics reports to gain insights into their traction. Using an easy to understand Statistics module in PressPage, the VELUX team is able to gain insights, and then optimize all their digital content.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,news,newclient,cases,CaseFri, 15 Sep 2017 02:41:00 -0500Virtual Reality: An Opportunity for Public Relations https://www.presspage.com/news/virtual-reality-an-opportunity-for-public-relations/
https://www.presspage.com/news/virtual-reality-an-opportunity-for-public-relations/Although Virtual Reality (VR) sounds like a bridge too far for some people, it has recently become more commonplace, not only for consumers but also for businesses. Think about Google Cardboard, but also Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive Headset, that offer affordable ways to experiment with VR.
]]>The potential of virtual reality as an experimental storytelling platform has many brands already experimenting with the possibilities. The technique is being adopted across industries, not only for its commercial value, but also because it can help stimulate learning and has the ability to connect products to experiences. The North Face isa good exampleof a company that started using VR for this last function. They shot footage of a climb in Yosemite National Park, which was turned into a VR experience for shoppers at its retail outlets in New York and San Francisco.

'Daylight experience' by Velux

Europe also has plenty examples of companies that use VR, such as Velux, a Danish company that specializes in roof windows and skylights. They applied VR to help consumers get an impression of the potential of their attic, by showing how a room could look with more daylight with the help of a roof window. Without VR, imagining the impact of Velux’ solutions on a room is hard to do, so the VR experience really helped (potential) customers to get a first look.

Six powerful reasons to start with VR

Marketing has embraced the opportunities that VR can offer, seeing the potential to empower marketing communication initiatives. Of course there are challenges, however in the eyes ofMSLGroup(a public relations network of companies) there are six powerful reasons for PR professionals to start diving into it right now:

Longer engagement time:VR has already proved that it can hold people’s attention for an extensive amount of time.

Deeper emotional engagement:VR makes consumers part of the brand experience as VR has the unique opportunity to offer an immersive experience that will stay with users forever.

Simplifying the complex:In VR users interact in a way that allows for a much more comprehensive and holistic understanding of the concept.

Greater devotion:VR helps in creating a stronger devotion to the brand, since it gives you the experience that you are really a part of it.

Condensed sales cycle:VR can be used to jump-start a consumer experience when it’s difficult or impossible to introduce the product itself.

Virtual reality underlines that a linear storyline is no longer a must, creating an interactive experience is. How do you go about it for your brand? Hiring a professional team that is experienced in using VR might be a good idea. But doing some research and testing out what your audience likes could also be the way to go. Android phones and iPhones are already equipped with cameras and video players that support 360° video. Using a simple branded holder to create a nice VR experience for your clients, is just a little extra step to take. Look at this great example ofTOMS shoes, are there ways you can support your brand story using VR? You probably can!

]]>virtualreality,news,trend,contentTue, 12 Sep 2017 03:18:00 -0500Three brands giving back to the community in wake of Hurricane Harveyhttps://www.presspage.com/news/three-brands-giving-back-to-the-community-in-wake-of-hurricane-harvey/
https://www.presspage.com/news/three-brands-giving-back-to-the-community-in-wake-of-hurricane-harvey/Within the last month, two Tropical hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, devastated communities in the southern parts of the United States and its surrounding regions.

Though Hurricane Harvey may have subsided, the devastating effects of the tropical storm are far from over. The Category 4 storm left thousands of residents in Texas and Louisiana homeless and without access to essentials, such as food, clean drinking water, sanitary and health services.

During this difficult time, it is not uncommon to see brands giving back to the community, usually in some form of monetary donation for relief in disaster-afflicted areas.

However, some brands and its representatives have gone above and beyond to give back to the community. These acts of service, often led by courageous employees, help turn the brand into more than just an organization; the brand become a symbol of community, courage, and resilience.

Here are three brands and its employees, that went above and beyond the call of duty.

Whataburger: Whatever It Takes

Whataburger, a Texas based restaurant chain closed all of its Houston locations on Monday, August 28. However, some customers were unable to leave the restaurants due to rapidly rising floodwaters.

When emergency teams in Houston asked boat owners to help reach people stranded in high water, Whataburger activated its own team to rescue those stranded in our restaurants.

The company has also worked hard to provide financial support to local food banks and reopen restaurants in hurricane affected areas like Corpus Christi.

Another act of personal heroism comes from Candace Wilson, a Cook's Children pediatric nurse, who joined rescue efforts on Port Arthur, Texas.

According to the story on Checkup Newsroom: "At one point, the PICU nurse accustomed to treating pediatric patients in a controlled environment found herself with an evacuee who was having trouble breathing. She started digging through equipment coming out of the nursing home and found a nebulizer. The only problem was, she didn’t have power to make it work. Instead of giving up, Wilson found a news crew van and began beating on the door. They were able to provide her an extension cord and she set up the machine right there on the hood of the vehicle."

Ace Hardware: We will be open tomorrow… We are not leaving

Stores in the region remained open, including Cypress Ace Hardware, which posted the following message on its Facebook page:

According to the story on Ace Hardware's newsroom, "A heightened focus is being placed on getting necessary merchandise to some of the hardest hit areas, including Corpus Christi, Texas."

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Harvey,Texas,Whataburger,Ace Hardware,Cook Children's,NewsMon, 11 Sep 2017 16:04:10 -0500How OhioHealth increased their newsroom coverage by 889% in one yearhttps://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year/
https://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year/ The healthcare organization's editorial philosophy and communications workflow is a stellar example of how to run your organization's online newsroom. Two years ago, OhioHealth, a not-for-profit, faith-based healthcare system in Ohio, switched their newsroom over to PressPage. Within the first year, their total viewership jumped from 11,588 visits in 2015 to 114,697 visits the next full year on their new PressPage newsroom. That is a meteoric 889% increase!

(NOTE: This is part 1 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can read part 2 here.)

]]>While we would love to say our platform empowered OhioHealth to achieve such numbers, the real secret lies in the way their team restructured their PR workflow and the subsequent editorial philosophy they adopted for their newsroom.

Finding traditional news media harder and harder to reach in the modern age, OhioHealth saw an opportunity to showcase their internal communications stories alongside their media relations efforts to truly create a one stop shop brand journalism website. We spoke to Missy Gleason, the managing editor of the OhioHealth Newsroom, and Mark Hopkins, director of Media Relations to learn their secrets.

Your team won an award from PRSA this year for best online newsroom. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Missy Gleason: Our local PRSA had a call for entries. Since our newsroom with PressPage was a yearold, Mark and I sat down and looked at how much our newsroom had grown from the old site to the new PressPage newsroom. It’s kind of insane how much it grew.

Mark Hopkins: With our old newsroom there was a total of 11,588 hits in 2015. And we didn’t know whatthat meant - we just said “alright is that good, is that bad?” We didn't know.

In the following calendar year, with our new PressPage newsroom, we had 114,697 hits. So from 12k to 115k – that's how big it was. 889% increase in hits to be exact.

Missy: So what we really wanted to share for that PRSA entry, was the thought that went behind this. It wasn’t only that“we need a new newsroom.” The mission truly was to start brand journalism at OhioHealth.

Can you tell us a little about your old system of doing things before you built the OhioHealth newsroom?

Mark:This whole process goes back four years. Our team was doing all the traditional things thatmedia teams do – pitching stories and writing news releases. Slowly we were starting to see that the news media was changing. They had fewer resources and the world was going to the digital side. And we just had all these great stories but we ran out of places that could run them. You know there’s only so many reporters, there’s only so many news stations. So we started talking about developing our own content and videos while still pitching our stories.

But that’s kind of where we ran into trouble. We didn’t know what to do with it. So when we came across PressPage, that really was when the lightbulb went off and we said - we have this idea for content, and now we have an easy to use, attractive looking digital platform for our newsroom.

What is your approach to publishing content?

Missy:We have taken the newsroom and tried to make it a good gathering of different type of news that we have created ourselves. The number one source of content is still stories in traditional news media. We’ve just found a way to keep it more engaging and keep our viewers on our website. So as opposed to sending them away to a TV station’s website to watch the story, we are now able to embed those video links on our PressPage site, keeping our audience on OhioHealth.

The second thing we’ve done is utilize our own media relations team to produce content that might not have gotten placed in the media, or even stories we felt we could tell better than news media. The media team got trained on how to shoot videos, so when we come across a situation where a story didn’t get picked up, or we can give a little more context and flavor, we’ll produce our own version of that story as well.

And then we also have an internal newsletter, which used to just go out within our hospitals. But there were stories in there that were well worth sharing beyond our hospitals. So we now share those stories as well.

Mark:So stories that we can push out about our culture, about the things that we do aside from all theclinical stuff are valuable to us as well. And we’ll prepare it in a brand journalism way that doesn’t sound salesy or hokey. Media relations people are often told "just go get this in the news", but it is not always that easy. But we now have a platform where these stories can live and our associates can tell their grandma, "Hey go to OhioHealth's newsroom and see me in that story".

How does social media play into this?

Missy:Well this approach gives the social media team a lot more content that is produced by usand drives people back to our website. We have very, very strong associate engagement on social media. So whenever we’re able to share something about what we’re doing here at OhioHealth, that pride factor is so high with our associates, that they share it too. So our reach on social media goes much farther too.

Do you ever run out of content for the newsroom?

Missy: It’s our goal to publish something every day, Monday through Friday. Along with brandjournalism, we have a service called HealthDaythat provides news coming out in the healthcare world from current clinical studies. We find if there is something in the news that is drawing a lot of attention, but we at OhioHealth don’t have the time to turn a story around on it, we can still get that content from HealthDay.

Mark: The reality is that there are some days in there where you run out of stuff. So it really is a good way to supplement your other content.

What kind of stories do your viewers share the most?

Missy: They really run the gamut. We just posted a really cute story on our Facebook page about asewing guild at one of our local hospitals that madesuperhero capes for NICU babies,and within an hour we had upwards of 70 shares. So it’sbabies in capes. It’s ‘tug at your heartstrings', but also the pride factor of ‘we love what we do for our patients’.

But it's also big news like opening a new hospital, or clinical advancements and new treatments that we’re doing. There’s no silver bullet to what kind of story does well. It really depends on the strength of the story.

Do you find yourself focusing on stories that pull at the heartstrings a little?

Missy: I don’t think we focus on it more. I think it's something that comes naturally to us. We are anorganization that cares for our patients and their entire family. So I don’t think it's a deliberate strategy. Though we do joke about the old adage of ‘puppies and babies’ get great play. So you always know that you’re going to have a winner if you have a puppy or a baby in the story. But it’s not like we make it a strategy.

Mark: Actually, we’ve also used the newsroom as a mechanism to get news out that may be negative forus. We had an incident at one of our campuses, where our security officers were seen on camera during an altercation with a visitor. It looked really bad and we investigated the situation. It was a very big story here locally for a while. And we used the newsroom as a platform to share the messages from the president of that hospital. It was very effective being able to provide information in an open, honest and timely way that we could drive people to.

It sounds like you really treat your online newsroom like a news site.

Missy:I have a background in broadcast journalism. I would say that as the editor of the OhioHealthNewsroom, I really try to look at it from the perspective of - if this page was a news show, what would we want our audience to see? Sometimes it is stories that are important that we share and don't have to be specifically uplifting or emotional. It may be important that we either make our stance known on it, or it is something that will better serve our community, or it is news that they need to know.

My biggest driving factor is the benefit to the reader or viewer – it’s really the ’what’s in it for me’ factor. It’s not us tooting our own horn, it’s truly trying to find out what our audience is going to want to know.

(NOTE: This is part 1 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can read part 2 here.)

]]>SaaS,PressPage,News,client,healthcare,newclient,CaseTue, 05 Sep 2017 09:54:19 -0500Infographic: Personalized communicationhttps://www.presspage.com/news/infographic/
https://www.presspage.com/news/infographic/Here you will find our latest infographic. Using infographics can help you gain more traffic. The PressPage platform allows you to easily embed infographic, 'pin' these straight away into your Pinterest account and it will be included in your media library. Interested in learning more about how to use infographics in your newsroom? Check out our our media library to see more infographics or try out PressPage for 14-days to see how it can work for you.
]]>This infographic is about personalized communication. How can you use personalized communication in your PR strategy?
]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,infographicThu, 31 Aug 2017 09:00:00 -0500Fearless Girl: how to create a buzz with offline PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/fearless-girl-how-to-create-a-buzz-with-offline-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/fearless-girl-how-to-create-a-buzz-with-offline-pr/There are quite a few offline PR campaigns that have generated a lot of attention in the past few years. A recent example is the “Fearless Girl” statue that was placed opposite the “Charging Bull” statue on Wall Street, New York City on March 7 2017. The statue was placed on International Women’s Day and is intended to inspire companies to recruit women to their boards. The statue was part of a campaign to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Gender Diversity Index fund of State Street Global Advisors.
]]>Reactions boost reach

The statue received quite some attention from a whole range of people. Mainstream media, feminists, bloggers and corporations reacted eagerly to the statue. One celebrating the meaning of the statue, while another, most sensationally the artist of the “Charging Bull” statue, offended by the impact the “Fearless Girl” statue has on the “Charging Bull” and its perception. Each and every one of them supporting the PR campaign this statue is part of.

Why does this campaign work?

Why did this campaign generate so much attention (source:Statue of Girl Confronts Bull, Captivating Manhattanites and Social Media)? There are a few characteristics that makes this campaign stand out. The statue is placed on a busy and famous spot and in a city that is known worldwide. It’s challenging a business that is significant to a lot of people around the world, and addressing an issue that is current and tends to generate a lot of attention. By being on Wall Street and addressing gender, there is an immediate tension surrounding the statue which invites people to react and form an opinion on the subject matter.

The statue is well made and photogenic, which makes it easy to take pictures with it and show them to loved ones. Also, the message of the campaign travels well internationally. Women's rights, equal pay and feminism are popular subjects in many countries. Because the placing of the statue and the positioning opposite the famous “Charging Bull” statue feels like an act of resistance, people are eager to respond to the statue and its message. The subject of the campaign is complex, yet easy to understand.

Use your core values

Creating a buzzing campaign like “Fearless Girl” isn’t that easy, but there are some pointers we can take away from this success. The campaign attached itself to a current issue and was executed well, and that is something you might be able to reproduce.

Think of the core values your product, service and company supports. Use these universal values as the core of your campaign, and use those to think of what the campaign should be about. These core values may be loyalty, safety, equality or integrity, to name a few. If entertainment is a huge part of your business, think of it as a way to take care of yourself. This way you may be able to attach your core values to current affairs and big societal developments to use in a campaign. Chances are, people feel connected to the issue and therefore to your company.

Make sure you execute it well. A well organized event, a nice piece of art or a well made sample go a long way when trying to reach your target audiences. Every piece of the puzzle should support the core value of the campaign and brand story. Be critical on every element you are producing, it should be authentic and matching your product, service, brand story and core values. Use a different view on your brand to create a compelling offline PR campaign.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,NewsTue, 29 Aug 2017 08:00:00 -0500The future of offline PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-future-of-offline-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-future-of-offline-pr/Your audience logs off, do you? Embrace offline PRThe changes in the field of PR have been focused on online development. Where does that leave offline PR? Well, not in the same spot as a few years ago. Offline PR is changing as we speak. Especially due to the evolution of online PR, offline will play a big role in the future. Authentic and personalized communication is on the rise, and offline PR has the tools to facilitate this trend.
]]>Rapid changes in the field of PR

Traditionally, offline PR consists of one-way communication without much feedback. With online communication being the norm, one-way communication is turning into a thing of the past. Personalized and direct communication is the latest trend that is taking over; audiences are looking for something that stands out. With an almost infinite amount of content to be found, it is of vital importance to be authentic and provide your audience with something valuable. Sending your brand message is not enough. Building a relationship based on trust and sharing valuable content your audience is looking for, is the way forward.

The past few years, the field of PR has changed quite a bit. With communication and marketing taking the lead in adapting online changes, PR has been pushed to embrace the latest trends and adapt to the changing world around us. Blogs, social media, forums and tools to monitor and schedule content have been integrated into most PR teams by now. Sharing content freely, presenting yourself as a thought leader within your field of expertise and connecting with your audiences on multiple online channels has become the norm. PR teams can’t stay behind. You need to be on top of the latest trends your audience is adapting to make sure you reach the people you are targeting.

Trends that are worth mentioning are:

Integrating blogs and social media into the PR strategy

Measurability of PR efforts is increasingly important

Focus on authentic brand story and thought leadership

Direct and personalized communication

Audiences are being targeted more specifically

Online versus offline

Nowadays, talking about offline PR is hardly possible without mentioning online. Online PR and online communication have changed the world immensely over the last two decades. Audiences are more in control of what content they consume and which channels and formats are being used to consume this content. Keeping up with the latest trends among your target audience is vital to a successful PR strategy, both online and offline.

With the introduction of many monitoring and scheduling tools for online communication, the need for measurable and standardized preparation of PR efforts is on the rise. Offline PR efforts, such as events, will need to be measured in terms of ROI. Also, the organization of offline PR efforts need to be standardized in order to have a clear overview and planning of the tasks at hand. In these ways, the development of online PR has greatly influenced offline PR. The funny thing is, due to the movement towards more authentic, direct and personalized communication in online PR, offline PR is proving to be increasingly relevant and important.

Audiences are being targeted constantly, online and offline. They can choose how, when and where to consume which content. To effectively connect with your target audience, you need to be where they are, present the content they want to consume and do this in a manner they find appealing. Using offline PR strategies will distinguish you from organizations that focus on online PR only. Hosting an event, attending seminars, participating in a relevant television show or collaborating on a piece for the newspaper will go a long way.

Traditional media still matter and audiences want to connect with you directly, preferably face to face. Use the assets you already have. Send your employees to interesting meetups and events, send them to speak at events and create an environment in which your employees are stimulated to tell the world about what they know and do. This will support your brand story and values and increase the chances of connecting with your target audience directly, in an authentic way.

Offline customer relationships

PR is about building relationships. Relationships are based on trust, adding value to each others lives and establishing a connection with each other. There is a lot you can gain with online PR, but it is people who make up your audience and they live offline! Connecting on a personal level is still the most valuable way of creating a lasting relationship. Go out there and talk to your audience, meet them in person and connect with them directly rather than online only (source:Has offline PR made a comeback?).

People still go to stores to buy an item they researched online and they trust on expert advice of a person they spoke to more than a blog or article on a website. Recommendations from peers are highly valuable. People are used to checking online reviews before they make a purchase, but they tend to take a recommendation from somebody they know more seriously (source:Marketing Statistics). Do you want to boost the word of mouth reputation of your business? Investing in client relationships, customer support and events is key to accomplishing that. A personal touch or face to face meeting has a more lasting impression than an article, online campaign or email conversation. Make sure your PR efforts touch both online and offline means to connect with your target audience.

The future of offline PR

The personalized relationships between organizations and their audiences is becoming increasingly important. Marketing and PR join forces more and more; supporting each other is vital in creating successful relationships with audiences and customers. Focusing on niche audiences and targeting them directly is on the rise, using offline PR means like events and industry magazines helps to connect with these people.

A proactive, transparent, and authentic approach is the way to do this. Building a lasting relationship with your audience is based on trust, and by being transparent and authentic you are creating a trustworthy image of your brand. Ultimately, this will lead to a lively community of customers, ambassadors, and prospects supporting your brand and brand story, both online and offline.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,offline,marketing,PRTue, 22 Aug 2017 08:00:00 -05005 technologies that will change how you do PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/5-technologies-that-will-change-how-you-do-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/5-technologies-that-will-change-how-you-do-pr/Embrace the future of public relations and communicationsTechnology is changing the world, and the world of PR is no exception. The rise of the internet, cell phones, and social media are just a few examples of how technology has impacted how people communicate.
]]>In a previous article we discussedfive trends that will affect public relationsprofessionals in the coming decade. These trends included:

the importance of influencers

the importance of online reputation management

thought leadership

the importance of measurability

contributors

Staying on top of the latest trends is one part of the equation. The other part is understanding the technological shifts that will change the world in the coming decades, and along with it, how you do PR. Recognizing and preparing for the emergence of these technologies now will be the difference between surfing the tech wave and being swept away as they break.

Artificial Intelligence

Of all the technological shifts that are taking place right now, the one that casts the largest shadow over PR is the emergence of artificial intelligence. According to Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly, we will see increasing‘cognification’in the next thirty years, whereby AI systems will infiltrate every aspect of society. The PR world will also see this change - machines will be able to understand public sentiment in real time by leveraging millions of gigabytes of data, write natural and insightful copy, and tailor it to audiences in a highly targeted way, all without human intervention.

This graph shows the rise of data in the past decade. Source: Patrick Cheesman

Big Data

The second trend that is deeply intertwined with the rise of AI, is the rise ofbig data.Big data refers to the large amounts of structured and unstructured information that is available for organizations to mine for insights. To put the increasing amount of data into perspective, consider this: 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years, at 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day.

IBM correctly notes in its2017 researchthat people today “increasingly expect companies to know them and cater to their likes, needs, wants and preferences with every transaction and every interaction”. Though the solution to this problem is big data, most organizations have not yet figured out how to leverage this information to better understand their readers.

Consequently, tools like AI systems that can parse through large amounts of data, and provide highly targeted content to users will become integral in PR. Though today, only big tech companies like Facebook are able to serve content tailored to their users’ likes and dislikes (ads and articles), in a few years this trend will be ubiquitous in PR.

Video

The emergence of Web 2.0 brought forth vast social media and multimedia tools, including video sharing capabilities. As of 2017, Youtube, Instagram Video, and Snapchat are some of the most innovative online tools that brands are employing to communicate their message, especially to younger audiences. Snapchat’srecent addition of ‘link’ capabilitiesto videos is the latest example of how videos have become the communicator’s best friend.

The proof is in the pudding - research by Animoto shows that 60% of millennials prefer to watch a video rather than read a newsletter, and 56% of consumers believe that if a company has a website, it should have a video. Social media platforms like Facebook have essentially made this decision for organizations by prioritizing video – Mark Zuckerberg has even described video as the biggest trend, andchallenge, for the next 5 years.

Subsequently, organizations have had tremendous success communicating their brand through video, particularly by producing video news releases (VNRs), b-roll footage for media use, or by producing pithy brand journalism videos which have the stickiness that marketing and advertising content often lack.

With the emergence of 360 degree videos, live streaming,virtualand augmented reality, video is here to stay and will only continue to become more important in the PR professional’s toolkit. The question will be whether PR professionals will be able to adapt and leverage these cutting-edge technologies to effectively communicate their organization’s PR messaging.

The University of Sydney’s 360 degree tour video, which explores the campus through the different perspectives of its students, demonstrates the power of communication that organizations now harness.

Email

Despite predictions of its demise in the mid-2000s, email has remained a surprising mainstay in the realm of PR in the past decade. Though email has seen little innovation in the recent past, we can expect to see certain advancements which will keep email at the forefront of public relations.

The first of these is increasing personalization through big data. While at the moment we are able to use structured data to superficially personalize emails (e.g. inserting Dearfirst name), with greater ability to organize unstructured data, PR practitioners will be able to send highly targeted emails using anincredibly personal style.

The second change will be the rise of interactive email. So far email has been unable to support elements of html5. We still won’t see an email load as a web page does: it doesn’t play video or show interactives. But once we see these ‘highly clickable’ elements in email, we can expect to see a breakdown in the barriers to engagement. In fact, html5 video in email is expected to take off in 2017- stay tuned. According toJordie van Rijnhowever, the two biggest issues that still hold back adoption are 1) technical challenges around implementation and 2) tracking and attribution changes.

Email will also be a space of increasing automation. In fact this trend has already begun with trigger actions such as‘welcome, thanks for subscribing’ emails. With greater leveraging ofbig data, and greater machine capabilities in natural language processing, we can also expect greater output of AI generated emails.

Social Media

Social media’s rise following 2005 has been meteoric and now it enjoys a comfortable spot at top of PR strategies worldwide, with no signs of any change. Though Facebook and Twitter have seen some decline in recent years, the vacuum has been replaced by new social media giants like Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Reddit. The interactions, tone of voice and distribution capabilities on social media channels have however evolved over the past decade. As the platforms have matured, so have the PR departments that rely on social media heavily.In particular, two major recent shifts in social are of note:

Shift away from organic to paid

In 2016, organic reach on Facebook fell by 52%, demonstrating that the social media platform’s algorithm has steadily shifted away from an organic reach towards a paid model. In fact, research has shown that a page with 500,000 likes could have an organic reach as low as 2%. Facebook’s official stance says they aim to prevent organizations clogging up a user’s newsfeed through excessive content. PR pros that rely on social media for distribution purposes would be wise to consider greater budgets for paid reach via social.

Rise of social messaging tools

As of 2015, monthly active users for messaging apps surpassed those of the social media users. Users around the world are now using messaging apps to connect with friends, brands and to view images and content. This presents a new opportunity to PR practitioners - connecting with audiences via messaging tools. Logging on to WeChat or Whatsapp and interacting with audiences could reap tremendous results - in fact, research from Webio found that 62% of millennials are more loyal to organizations that engage with them via messaging apps.

Embrace the future of PR

The incremental progress of technology often gives the impression of stagnancy. Video, email, and social media have become so fundamentally entrenched in our lives, that we are not always capable of noticing their changing nature or impact. Yet, ideas are always growing, knowledge is accumulating, and technology is evolving. Just as email and social media changed the PR landscape in the past decades, so will the technologies of the coming decades. These tools not only allow us to better communicate our audience, but also better understand them. As PR professionals, we must embrace the future of PR by embracing the future of these technologies.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,future,social media,video,big data,ai,artificial intelligence,technologyTue, 15 Aug 2017 07:40:10 -05005 powerful trends in PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/5-powerful-trends-in-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/5-powerful-trends-in-pr/Embrace them nowOver the last years a lot of professions have changed almost unrecognizably. Look at marketing for example: we have gone from mass direct mails to personalized social media messages. The number of tools marketing professionals have at their disposal has increased tremendously. Although PR people are able to use a lot of these tools as well, this business has not changed with the same pace marketing has.
]]>In the coming years, however, PR is expected to take big steps in its growth as well.The Global Communications Report, a worldwide survey of more than 1000 senior PR executives worldwide, reveals that the worldwide PR industry is predicted to grow from its current estimated size of 14 billion dollars to 19.3 billion dollars over the next five years.

The following five trends will accelerate the change in practice of public relations:

#1: Influencers are becoming increasingly more important

A term that has been buzzing around this year, is influencer marketing. Where it differentiates from standard marketing and PR efforts is that it focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to a larger market. They will do the work for you if you inspire, hire, or pay them. These influencers can be anyone: a celebrity, someone who likes to run a podcast in their spare time, or even young bloggers or vloggers. The biggest difficulty with this trend is engaging and interacting with influencers from a business point of view. It requires a specific approach since they are usually not experienced public figures with agents or established systems for brand partnerships. So start finding your authentic advocates who actually connect with their followers and your target audience, to see what you both can do for each other.

#2: Online Reputation Management is a must-have

Whether it’s in real life or on Twitter or other social media, PR’s main goal is still getting people to talk about you. When you send a story to a journalist, you can assume they’ll look up who you are and what your company does. Based on the outcome of that search, the journalist will decide whether to follow up on your story or not. If they find good, solid content from your brand/organization, which shows off your expertise, it will have a positive result. On the other hand, if there is not much content available or the content you do have is negative, there is a chance the journalist won’t pick up the news.

You must focus on managing your online reputation and getting your message to the right audience by consistently creating and publishing quality content. This does not just mean covering up negative news, but it is also about putting yourself in a position to avoid negative attention and about proactively generating positive stories and press.

#3: Thought leadership will be one of the priorities for the PR budget

A newer marketing trend is thought leadership, in which business leaders and companies position themselves as leaders in their spaces. This trend serves as a good framework for related PR tactics and campaigns. Brands need to be seen as leaders, so it is not only about offering great products and services, but they must also offer ideas and inspiration. Focusing on thought leadership helps to surround the company with the right content, which is valuable, educational, and engaging.

From a PR perspective you can see that communication is more focused on executive visibility and leadership. Reputation management is also part of all these programs, further supporting the notion that it is a must-have.

#4: All PR efforts are measurable and are being measured

More and more fields of the business are becoming data driven, a trend which is a difficult one for the PR branch. Being data driven is not a standard competency people in PR should have, and next to that, there is no industry standard for the evaluation of PR results. Luckily there are steps being made in this regard: a coalition of professional groups has created guidelines for benchmarking and measuring PR programs.

Though there is no one-size-fits-all formula, there are lots of ways to measure your PR efforts. By looking at the both thequantitative and qualitative metrics, you can define the success. The rise of all online (marketing) tools has made it even easier to get an idea of how you are performing. Gaining insights into basic KPI’s such as brand awareness and favorability, social engagement and traffic quality can help to improve your strategy over time.

#5: Contributors are becoming more important

Although some industries are still using the traditional press release, it is a lot less popular than it used to be. The shape in which the news is being brought to audiences has changed, but we are also seeing that companies and journalists are not the only ones who bring the news anymore. Contributor marketers are gaining popularity and they are frequently invited to share insights on industry topics. Especially for B2C companies, contributors are playing an important role, since they are authentic and their main priority is not being a journalist. Most consumers therefore enjoy hearing what these contributors have to say about a topic.

Media companies are also focusing more on (paid and unpaid) contributors, assuming they have something interesting, new, valuable and/or controversial to say. If the contributor has an engaged social network and they can prove they are influential in their own right, the media companies will continue to want to work with them.

Embrace the latest trends

Of course these are not the only trends that will play an important role in PR, we see that these trends are the starting point for a change in the PR industry. Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence are influencing all sorts of industries and we expect that the PR industry can also use it to benefit from it. Are you eager to implement a hot new trend in PR? Check out our new eBook on video!

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,trends,data,influencerMon, 14 Aug 2017 09:40:02 -0500A good newsroom will improve your SEOhttps://www.presspage.com/news/a-good-newsroom-will-improve-your-seo/
https://www.presspage.com/news/a-good-newsroom-will-improve-your-seo/Avoid these five common mistakes.Is your newsroom supporting your SEO or killing your ranking? Check out these five common mistakes to make sure your newsroom is helping visitors discover your website instead of driving them away.
]]>1. Google does not like pdf, it likes posts and pages

Posts and pages on a website or newsroom contain information in the HTML code that tells Google what kind of information can be found on a specific page or post. A pdf does not contain this information. Obviously you can add metadata information to a pdf to make it easier to find the file, but Google prefers posts and pages to pdf. Uploading your press releases in pdf does not support your SEO and it may drive visitors away that do not feel comfortable downloading a file from your website, or those that simply can’t be bothered (check out this report:Which World Bank Reports are widely read?). Be wise and upgrade your newsroom to an environment based on actual web pages rather that pdf documents.

2. Social sharing will improve your ranking

A modern newsroom is up to speed with all the latest social media plugins. Sharing to social media sites and linking to your social platforms is easy and clear. This is not just for fun or to hoard followers – social sharing improves your ranking. Google for example ranks sites like Facebook and LinkedIn quite high. It considers those sites as reliable sources for quality content. If your blog post or press release is being shared widely on those platforms, it will impact your ranking which improves your SEO. Make sure it’s easy to share your content on social media platforms from any post and page on your newsroom.

3. Adding multimedia boosts SEO

Search engines have been smart enough to find multimedia for a long time, and they like it. Especially Google considers additional relevant multimedia to a page or post a great reason to value it as content of high quality. Adding multimedia to content is not simply uploading a funny image or video. Always make sure your multimedia adds value to the content, the metadata you provide in the multimedia is clear and specific, and the image or video is being displayed nicely in terms of lay-out of the page in different browsers and on multiple devices. Do not miss out and add visuals to every post and page.

4. Responsive website is key to score

With over half of the web traffic being requested on mobile devices, not having a responsive website and newsroom is a guarantee you are missing out on reaching your audience. Besides that, search engines give out penalties to sites who fail to include a proper responsive website in their online presence. By using a modern newsroom, you are sure your visitors can reach the newsroom on any and every possible device and Google will love you for it.

Nowadays, newsrooms and websites usually have great possibilities to provide valuable metadata and create SEO friendly permalinks without going through major hassle. Add tags, categories, multimedia, snippet preview and more to provide search engines and people using these search engines with valuable information so your page can be found easily. By adding a SEO friendly permalink (the link to your article or page), you provide even more valuable information to the page which makes it easy for search engines to get what the page is about. Leaving out valuable metadata and permalinks will make it difficult for search engines to find what your content is about and why it is of any value.

Use SEO practices and a modern newsroom

By including SEO practices while using a modern newsroom, it should be easy to boost your web traffic and bounce rates. With the right people coming to your site who know what to expect when they enter a page, chances are they will like what they see. Making it easy for search engines to know what your page is about and to enrich a page with all the information Google prefers, you should be able to get on the first page of any search engine. Using a modern newsroom that offers all these functionalities, it does not take a lot of time and effort to create SEO friendly posts and pages offering content your audience will love.

Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your SEO and PR?

Sources:

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,SEO,ContentTue, 08 Aug 2017 09:41:07 -0500Create a memorable experience for your audiencehttps://www.presspage.com/news/create-a-memorable-experience-for-your-audience/
https://www.presspage.com/news/create-a-memorable-experience-for-your-audience/How to use events in PREvents and PR have been inseparable for decades. The question of whether events are still an effective tool for PR rises every now and then within the industry. It is obviously important to determine if events are an effective tool for your specific PR strategy and goals. And if they are still effective, to ask yourself if you are getting the most out of your events. How do you make sure your event supports your PR goals?
]]>The Age of Experience

Over two decades after the introduction of the world wide web, the Information Agehas come to an end. We have entered the Age of Experience, an age in which events are quite important. An event is a great way to provide your audiences with a special and engaging experience. This may be in real life or virtual, but the key is the audience has a valuable experience which they can connect to your brand in a positive way. Clients nowadaysvalue experiencesmore than anything else. Events can be a great way to interact and connect with audiences on a personal and emotional level. This may not generate leads or boost sales, but it will definitely support your PR and brand image.

With everybody and anybody jumping onto the bandwagon when it comes to creating experiences and reaching target audiences, it is important your event makes sense and adds value. Think about what you want to achieve and with who before anything else.

Events as a brand experience

Organizing just any event will not support your PR and business goals as much as you may like. The event should provide value to the target audience you are trying to reach. If you are asking people to clear time in their busy schedules to spend time at your event, you better make it worth it! What are the main obstacles your target audience is dealing with? Make sure you tackle this at your event using an engaging, entertaining and valuable program.

The combination of your brand and your event needs to make sense. It needs to be an understandable part of your brand image, brand story, ethics and goals. In the end, you are trying to form a relationship with your audiences so they are willing to buy your goods and services. An event that has no relation to your product, service, brand story and core values will not support your PR and business goals. And that is a true waste of money.

How to create a successful event as part of my PR strategy?

Organizing a great event is not simple. There are quite some elements to keep in mind. Luckily there are some main questions you can ask yourself to get started. Who is your target audience, what is their main question or obstacle, and what PR of business goal do you want to support with this event? Answering these questions will easily narrow down what kind of event you will organize, what subjects you are going to cover and who will be invited to it. Perhaps a conference is your best option, maybe a contest will suit your goal better, or a media event is what you need. Determine these basic elements before you move ahead to the more ‘sexy’ elements of your event planning.

As shown in the above image, an event can offer four kinds of experiences. By including all four categories in your event, you will hit the ‘sweet spot’. “Generally, we find that the richest experiences [...] encompass aspects of all four realms, forming a “sweet spot” around the area where the spectra meet” (Welcome to the experience economy). Think about the goal, audience and subjects you have defined for your event. Are there ways you can approach all the elements in your program to hit all four categories? Using a theme may help to bring all elements together in an understandable and memorable way. Addressing all five senses during your event, adding recognizable elements that trigger memories and adding little impressions throughout the event will help elevate your program and make it stand out to your audience.

Think about the events you went to, which one made a lasting impression? What were the elements to ensure you will remember the event weeks, months or even years after it took place? You may not be able to copy exact elements to your own event, but it might give you some inspiration to think about your program a little bit differently. If you are aiming to create an experience for your audience, make it a good one!

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,NewsTue, 01 Aug 2017 03:10:00 -0500Online data and PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/online-data-and-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/online-data-and-pr/The basics for public relations professionalsOnline data is booming. With big data being a hot topic and public relations professionals being pressured to deliver measurable results, online data can not be ignored anymore. When you have set up your PR strategy and efforts without considering using online data, it may be challenging to incorporate this new way of thinking. How do you go about it?
]]>Why use online data for PR?

Let’s start with the most important question, why should you care? Simply put, using online data before you start a new campaign “greatly improves the chance your efforts will turn out to be worthwhile” asAlexander de Ruitermentioned during PR is Key 2017. Next to that, most companies have online data already available, they just lack the knowledge and tools to effectively use it. Invest some time to set up using online data and you can increase the chances of success dramatically.

How to gather online data

Online data can be gathered on different platforms and using different tools. Which data to gather may be very specific for your organization and business goals, though there are some pointers to take into account. Engagement and followers on social media, visitors to your website, the amount of time spent on your website, the type and amount of data collected in your information database, percentage of opened newsletters among others may be good metrics to use. Perhaps if you are interested in how your PR efforts are being received, an interview or questionnaire may be a good idea. To find out more about measuring PR results quantitatively and qualitatively, check outMeasuring PR success in terms of quantity and quality.

Google Analytics is a widely used tool to track the behaviour of visitors to your website. Engagement on social media platforms can be tracked on quite a few platforms directly, like on the Facebook Page dashboard, or using different tools like Cision and OBI4WAN. Facebook provides a lot of personal information about the people who like your post, which is valuable information you can use to tailor your message to the preferences of your audience. Check the tools and platforms you are currently using to see what data is already available. You might find a little gold mine! Just make sure the data you are using is valuable and complete to ensure a clear outcome of your research.

How to use online data to improve your PR strategy

Once you have found online data on the platforms and tools you are using, or you have conducted research to gather this data, it is time to take the next step. How are you going to use this data to actually improve your PR efforts?

Firstly, create some overview in the data you have gathered. If you are able to group the data in a few bullet points, you will have some structure to work with. Using pivot tables is a great way to get insight in your online data,‘How to create a pivot table in Excel’is a great tutorial to get you started.

Secondly, ask yourself questions such as who is consuming your content, in what ways are they consuming this content, when are they doing this, what content performed very well or poorly, and what is the overall sentiment surrounding your business? By answering these questions using the data you gathered, you are able to use the data to create in-depth insight in your audience and PR efforts.

After that, use the data driven answers to your questions to revisit the content you are producing, the times you are posting, the platforms you are distributing your message to and how you are trying to support the business goals. Are you reaching the right audiences and are you doing that in a way they like to be addressed?

Finally, use all these valuable insights when creating a new campaign or new content, or evencreate models to optimize your strategy. Set clear goals and expectations for your campaign based on the data driven answers to the research questions. Monitor how the campaign is doing by continuously gathering new data, and finetune the campaign when needed, to improve the results. Not only will you increase the chances of success, you will also be able to pinpoint exactly what is going on with your PR efforts using clear data and numbers. This insight will prove valuable to both PR professionals who want to improve their efforts and their management teams who are curious to see what the results of the PR strategy are.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,ROITue, 25 Jul 2017 08:46:59 -0500Lessons from ancient Greece - Aristotle on storytellinghttps://www.presspage.com/news/lessons-from-ancient-greece-aristotle-on-storytelling/
https://www.presspage.com/news/lessons-from-ancient-greece-aristotle-on-storytelling/Storytelling is an ancient art that is still very much alive. Being able to tell a story your audiences will enjoy, remember, and engage with, is both compelling and difficult to accomplish. There are many ways to tell a story. What does Aristotle teach us about storytelling and how does that relate to PR?
]]>Pity, Fear and Catharsis

According to Aristotle, a story must have pity, fear and catharsis. These are the basic elements to a compelling story. The main lesson in this is to keep your focus on the audience, and not on your characters, plot, or yourself as a writer. The concepts Aristotle mentions are chronological.

When creating a piece of content such as a blog post or a video, you are creating content to entertain your audience. In order to do that, your audience needs to feel some kind of connection to the characters of your story. They need to feel sympathy for your characters to be engaged with the story. The main character of an engaging blog might be the writer, an expert or a PR professional, for example.

When the audience feels sympathy for the characters of a story, they are compelled to continue reading or watching the story. If nothing noteworthy happens in a blog or video, it is not worth to continue following the story. A conflict of some sort is needed.

Ending a story with some sort of conclusion is the final step. This doesn’t have to be a happy ending, obviously you can write an unhappy ending also. But it does need to be an ending to the story which creates the catharsis. Leaving out an ending to any piece of content you create will leave the reader or viewer unsatisfied.

Aristotle’s Framework for storytelling

Next to the three big ingredients for a story mentioned above, Aristotle thought of a valuable framework for stories also. In order to create a good story, you will need to create and think of these seven essential elements:

Plot

Character

Theme

Diction

Melody

Decor

Spectacle

Before you start with your story, big or small, think of how these elements will contribute to the story and what they will consist of. All elements support each other and make up a good story. Thinking through what the framework of your story will be, gives you the opportunity to connect all these elements and prevent loose ends or plot holes. Start, for example, with a bulleted framework when writing an article to make sure you touch upon all essential elements.

Plot

The plot is, according to Aristotle, the most important aspect of a story. The plot defines what the story is about, and what your audience will experience. It includes a change of fortune that affects the main characters and will make your audience feel emotion(s).

The plot will state what the essence of the story is. A good story will have a simple plot, that can be explained in just a few sentences. Your audience wants to be entertained by a believable story they can understand, a simple plot will do just that. Take, for example, Star Wars films. The plot is simple: in a far away galaxy, the good guys try to solve or prevent a war with the bad guys. Every film revolves around this basic idea, the characters and theme vary.

Character

No story can do without characters. The characters are the main elements that will create action, arouse emotion and connect with your audience. Your characters can be human, animals or even objects. Aristotle defined four character traits to keep in mind:

a character must have one or more ‘good’ qualities that wins the respect of your readers

the qualities of the character must make sense based on their identity

the character must be believable

the character must have consistent traits

A character which is shy and timid on one page and arrogant on another doesn’t make sense, a housekeeper that owns a castle and an expensive sports car neither. Make sure the character traits and lifestyle you pick to include in your story, make sense with the character’s background, personality and society you place them in. If you are talking about the professional life of an industry expert, it might be irrelevant to include their hobbies or household. This way, the main characters are easy for your readers to connect with and trust.

Theme

Theme is a pretty word for setting or surroundings. When creating a story, there is an environment involved that directly and indirectly affects the story, storyline and characters. Think about where you want the story to take place and how this will affect the characters, plot, actions and atmosphere of the story. Theme, or thought, is an essential element to the character and the plot.

This might be more directly relevant for fictional stories, but don’t skip this step when you are creating non-fictional professional content. You are creating an experience for your readers or viewers, what are the surroundings you can include to support the story and experience? Are you using a colourful quote, images or example to create a certain atmosphere? Is there any background information on interviewees you can include or information about your company that might support the plot of your story? Take TOMS Shoes for example. Their brand story has a particular setting that is vital to their identity: founder Blake Mycoskie was travelling through poor parts of Argentina when he thought of the idea for his business, he felt the need to help. Creating a compelling and interesting theme or surrounding for your story might just be the difference between a good and an excellent piece of copy!

Diction

Diction, choice of words or tone of voice are of vital importance to make sure your story resonates with your audience. Are you speaking the same language? Is your tone supporting the message you want to convey? And is the platform you chose complementary to the story and diction of your story?

All too often content is being produced without taking a proper look at diction. Take a second to think of the choice of words that will suit your brand story, plot, audience and platform of distribution. Do these connect or is there any friction between the preferred tone of voice of one of the elements and another? The right tone of voice for a brand is not set in stone, especially when communicating with different audiences who have different needs.

Melody

When thinking of melody, music and audio is what comes to mind. A recognizable melodic tune is a great way to brand your content, audiences who have heard the tune before will instantly recognize the music. Think of the tune of the Star Wars movies, hearing the melodic tune from these movies will instantly bring you back to the emotions you experienced when watching it.

But melody is much more than just music. The theory of Aristotle describes certain recognizable structures and patterns that can be used to communicate effectively with your audience. Using a recognizable lay-out for your website or blog post, a standard structure for your YouTube videos, the same host or model for your presentations and flyers will help your audience recognize your brand, your story and perhaps even your industry. Take Apple and McDonald’s. Any and every piece of their brand story is being recognized instantly all over the world, because these brands use a certain melody or structure in their PR and communications.

Decor

The decor is the design of the surroundings of the story. Your story will take place in a certain setting or theme, that has a certain look and feel. This also goes for your brand story, blog post or video. What does your website design look like and how does this support your story? If you are creating a blog post or video, how does it look for your audience?

Think about the visual aspects of your content – your audience does. In fact, 90% of data that the brain processes is visual and 65% of people are visual learners. Look at Nike, their story focuses on a ‘hero’s journey’. Their decor is challenging, of humble origin and creates a believable setting for a hero that needs to take on a challenge on his or her own. Using a strong, understandable and believable decor for their story, they successfully inspire others to be their own heroes. Don’t miss out by forgetting to think about the decor of your story.

Spectacle

Aristotle defines spectacle as the stage appearance of the actors, or everything that is seen and heard on stage. This obviously derives from theatre that is performed on stage, but how does this translate to the content within your PR strategy? Think of your blog, social media platforms and events as ‘stages’ and think of all the action going on on these stages. Any visual display, spoken word, nonverbal communication and the written word all make up the spectacle.

Any written word on your website is essentially an indirect dialogue with your audience. Think of all the elements in your PR strategy that can be defined as spectacle, and think of the fact Aristotle classified this as least important for your story. Usually the actual spectacle, is viewed as most important. It is the actual product, the fruit of your labour that you will send out to the world. Take Dove, for example. Their ‘Mission: Care’ campaign centered around fathers that are away from home and their children. By focusing on the emotions and the story, there is no need to market the product. While the actual product or service is important, make sure you place value on other elements of your story.

Lessons learned from Aristotle

Taking into account the thousands of years old lessons Aristotle teaches us, there are a few main things to focus on. Firstly, prepare the stories you want to tell your audience thoroughly. Stories worth telling usually contain all the elements Aristotle defined. Preparation is key. Secondly, prioritize the elements of your story. What is most important to share with your audience? Make sure your plot is simple, compelling, and it contains the essential concepts of storytelling: pity, fear and catharsis. If you get the basics straight, it’s a lot less difficult to write amazing stories.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,contentTue, 11 Jul 2017 08:00:34 -0500The University of Manchester: “People actually want to share the content now”https://www.presspage.com/news/the-university-of-manchester-people-actually-want-to-share-the-content-now/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-university-of-manchester-people-actually-want-to-share-the-content-now/How PressPage helped The University of Manchester migrate their archive and optimize their PR practicesThe University of Manchester has seen a dramatic increase in social media traffic since they started using their PressPage newsroom. The most substantial advantage, however, has to do with the day-to-day operations: "The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use."
]]>The University of Manchester is the UK’s largest single site university with almost 40,000 students, and is also one of the world’s top research universities, with 25 Nobel Prize winners having worked or studied there. Jamie Brown, News & Media Relations Manager, oversees a team that is responsible for the day-to-day contact with journalists and promoting news about the University’s research and students. He also manages the online newsroom, which needed an update three years ago when he started at The University of Manchester.

Publishing stories was really time-consuming

Jamie: “For a number of years we had been using a CMS that we had developed ourselves. With this old CMS, it was really time-consuming to publish stories. But in addition to that it had limited multimedia options. We were looking for a solution which would enable us to more easily publish news stories with rich media such as video and photos, which can easily be shared via social media.” When looking into the solution that PressPage offered them, it seemed like a good fit: “We had strict brand guidelines and security guidelines, but all of those requirements were dealt with really professionally.”

Migrating seven years of history

There was a bit of a challenge: The University of Manchester wanted to migrate approximately seven years of stories (their archive consisted of more than 6,000 stories in total). “Although it seemed like a challenge, everything was migrated easily. Since the PressPage platform is so easy to use, it was quite easy to train other people within our team to use it. During this implementation our dedicated customer success manager responded quickly whenever there was an issue.”

Ease of use and flexibility

Overall Jamie is very happy with how the platform works for them. “The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use. We’ve trained people very quickly across different teams. It’s really flexible and people actually want to share the content now, which they didn’t before. Social media traffic to our website has dramatically increased, more people than ever before are reading the news articles and they’re staying on pages for longer.

One of the other pluses is that the news releases can be enriched with all sorts of media. “You can add a video, add an image gallery or even social media sharing options. Using PressPage saves us a lot of time in creating better releases and publishing them.”

Collaboration with PressPage

Jamie does not talk about a supplier, but about a partner. “Collaboration has been key to the success of this project. Not only does PressPage always respond quite quickly, we can also feed ideas in and we’ve noticed those ideas are coming back and being adopted on the platform. That’s really helped us to put our own ideas forward.”

Of course it does not stop here, there are also improvements to be made for The University of Manchester. Jamie notes: “We have seen the effect of the scientific community on Reddit, which made us think that we should do more with that platform. But also we want to incorporate our online magazine into our newsroom, to enrich the type of stories that are now being posted.”

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,NewClient,educationWed, 05 Jul 2017 05:00:02 -0500Dealing with various stakeholders in the education sectorhttps://www.presspage.com/news/dealing-with-various-stakeholders-in-the-educational-sector/
https://www.presspage.com/news/dealing-with-various-stakeholders-in-the-educational-sector/The challenge of a PR professionalThe educational field is of major importance for a thriving society, but it’s also a field that has to create magic with little means to get the job done. There are many challenges to face being a PR professional in the education sector. How do you take the hurdles with grace and reach the audiences you want to connect with?
]]>Challenges in the Education industry

The educational field has always had a tough time juggling budget, goals, time and interests. PR professionals have limited time and budget to make sure their educational organization is being noticed by the right people. There are lots of interesting stories to tell, but do they reach the right people? Some challenges PR professionals face in the education industry are:

Competition is not only locally or nationally, but also internationally

More channels are being used in communicating, internally and externally

Goals for PR departments

PR departments at larger educational organizations may deal with many different internal departments that call upon their time and resources, while PR teams working for smaller educational organizations may find it difficult to get their message out there. Big or small, there are quite some goals and roles involved when working in educational PR.

Goals of the PR department include support the enrolling of new students and getting more people to know the institution. Also guarding and enhancing the reputation is an important goals, as is maintaining relationships with employees, students, the academic community, alumni and donors. Finally, influencing decision makers is a goal for most PR departments in education, since the decision and relationship with the decision maker may reflect positively on the institution. Reaching all these goals and taking up all the different roles involved, is far from an easy task. How do you go about it? Find out how Governors State University handles their PR and got more interest from journalists.

“The old press release is dead”

The good old days, where you would simply send a press release to a journalist and they would post an article on it, are over. Journalists are swamped with emails, press releases and other messages that are being send to them daily. To stand out to journalists and to reach your audience, you need to go about it differently. PR is not mainly about media coverage anymore.

Directly connecting with your audiences is more important than ever. But who is your audience? Well, quite a lot of people to be fair. Most educational institutions engage with many different audiences. Among them are current and future students, employees, investors, the academic community, partners and journalists. A press release sent to a few journalists is not going to reach all of them. At least, not anymore. How do you reach these audiences and support your PR goals?

New ways to engage with your audience

With limited time and resources, it is vital to make sure your efforts will pay off. What can you do to get the most out of your PR efforts within the education industry? There are a few key points to keep in mind.

Know your audience

When trying to reach many different target groups, it is incredibly important to make sure you know who you are talking to. Make sure you know your audiences by taking the time to define the different groups you are communicating with.

When you have that in place, it is easier to use the right channels to communicate with these different groups. Social media channels are an important aspect in a PR strategy, make sure to direct your attention to the channels your audiences are actually using. It makes it easier to reach them and it is a valuable way of generating feedback from your target audiences. Cater to the needs and preferences of your audience and tailor your message and distribution accordingly.

Use your resources

You may have a limited budget and just so much time in a day to make it all work, but there are ways to make use of your resources more efficiently. Check which workflows you could automate. Social media posting can be automated, for example, and sending out newsletters with the latests posts to the sub-site of a department can also be done automatically. Make it easy for visitors to add your RSS feed to their feed program by adding a link in a logical place, and think about the option to provide separate RSS feeds for sub-sites or categories.

Of course the RSS feed and social media channels need to be filled with interesting and engaging content. Blogs are a great way to provide valuable content to your audiences. Where press releases focus on ‘hard’ news, blogs are a great way to give information about interesting subjects that relate to your institution and give visitors to your website an insight into your organisation, academic achievements, student life and employees.

Engage with your audience

Just sending out content to your audiences is something of the past. Make sure you spark the conversation on your social media channels and, if applicable, your website. With the majority of people preferring visual content, don’t miss out on using images, infographics and video. Especially video is on the rise, shift your view on your content creation process and see when and where you could create a video instead.

Most educational organizations have different departments covering different subjects. Do you group this information online, or do you offer ways to consume content that is related to one subject only? By creating areas on your website (and perhaps even your social channels) that are meant for specific subjects, it is easier for visitors to find what they are looking for and to engage in conversation about the topic of interest.

Creating content that is worth sharing and making sure that people share it, can be a challenge. By using rich media in their press releases, The University of Manchester has seen a dramatic increase in social media traffic. Read more about their experiences.

Distinguish yourself using your PR strategy

Competing with educational institutions locally, nationally and even internationally, it can be difficult to stand out to the crowd. Luckily there are a few pointers to get a head start. Make sure your base is in check and you keep your audience in mind at all times. Things to check off include:

Make it easy to contact the relevant team or colleague by providing contact details in your online articles and press releases

Make sure there is a way to reach the organization or PR department outside of office hours

Add biographies of professors and experts that are mentioned on the website

Add social media sharing buttons to make it easy to share your content

Use a tag cloud or related news overview to guide visitors to related pages

Provide a multimedia library to easily access and download media

Add some fun to the content you create for students: sports, testimonials of students, etc.

A vital part of your PR strategy is your own website. Make sure this caters your audiences by providing valuable content, a logical structure of the site and pages, and easy ways to engage with your organization and its content. Having a good functioning website and newsroom is indispensible for your PR strategy. Without that, your efforts will not pay off. Then you will spend money on your PR efforts, just to send people away when they reach your website and newsroom. Be sensible about the time and money you are spending by making sure your base, the website and newsroom, meet the expectations of your audiences and by focusing on your audience’s needs.

Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your PR strategy? Request a free 14-day trial to try it out.

]]>News,PR,content,educationWed, 05 Jul 2017 04:59:30 -0500Development Report Q2 2017https://www.presspage.com/news/development-report-q2-2017/
https://www.presspage.com/news/development-report-q2-2017/UI/UX updates for all content modulesThe second quarter of 2017 was mainly about developing several new APIs and tools, which we’ll go into in a future update. Fortunately, we also managed to launch a number of upgrades to our platform we’re happy to tell you about right now!
]]>Content modules

All content modules will be treated to an UI/UX update, which we’re gradually implementing per module. Currently there are 10 modules delivered. Updated and future modules will have the following requirements:

Improvement of workflow

Option to multiply

Choice of custom title

Option to toggle on/off or delete

Improved indexing and search results

Some other recently implemented updates include improvements to the way internal searches are conducted and how newsrooms are indexed by search engines:

Custom or specifically tagged releases can now be excluded from the Newsroom search results

Sitemaps are now multilingual for better indexing in external search engines

Other cool stuff

We’ve also added the Serbian, Slovakian and Slovenian languages to the platform. PressPage Mail has been equipped with sender management, allowing users to create, edit and delete “From” addresses. There is now a separate section for Meta modules, with General, Twitter and Facebook modules available. And lastly, a custom tag can now be set to the main categories in the Category manager to improve flexibility for multilingual Media Libraries.

Want to stay on top of the latest developments? Be sure to check the roadmap in the main PressPage Manager menu (top-right corner) for upcoming functionalities!

]]>News,developmentTue, 04 Jul 2017 03:44:52 -05005 essentials for a successful newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/5-essentials-for-a-successful-newsroom/
https://www.presspage.com/news/5-essentials-for-a-successful-newsroom/How to exceed the expectations of your visitorsNowadays, an online newsroom is an essential part of a successful PR strategy. But how do you use your newsroom to its full potential? There are many tips and tricks to be found when you search for inspiration online. Luckily it boils down to just five essentials to keep in mind to create the best newsroom possible.
]]>1. It starts with accessibility

It may seem a no-brainer, but make sure to check if your newsroom is easily accessible. Accessibility is not a straightforward subject to cover. Obviously, the newsroom should be live. Checking beforehand if the hosting company of your newsroom is able to cope with large amounts of traffic (during a crisis or event, for example), updates of servers and databases, and technical issues that might arise may save you a lot of headaches later on. In this way you make sure your newsroom stays online, whatever the circumstances may be.

Accessibility is not just a question of technical or hosting capabilities. Potential visitors of your newsroom should be able to easily find your newsroom, the information they are looking for and the person or team they would like to contact. By adding a link to your newsroom on the homepage, using best practices of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and giving your newsroom an obvious name, it will be easier for your visitors to reach the newsroom and information they are looking for. Include your PR officers' contact information in the newsroom and on every press release. Getting in touch with journalists and potential clients is usually the goal of a press release. Make it easy to reach this goal by adding contact information in logical and easy to find places in the newsroom and press releases.

2. Easy and intuitive navigation

Visitors may reach your newsroom from various places. Usually, the amount of visitors that type in the name of your website or newsroom url to visit it directly is minimal. Visitors may come from a social media platform, a newsletter, another article they have read on your website, an external link or another place where the link to your press release can be found. This means that most visitors have little or no context to the press release. They may not know where to find interesting pages on your website and other relevant articles. Make it easy for them to stay on your website longer by adding an obvious menu structure, a distinct search bar and links to relevant pages and articles.

Place yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor to your website. What do you expect to find when visiting your newsroom? What do you expect to find when reading a press release? Check out examples of other companies to see if their navigation inspires you to revise your own. Ask some people internally or externally (perhaps a partner or friend could provide some helpful insights) to visit your newsroom and identify possible obstacles. At the end of the day, serving your newsroom’s visitor supports the main goal of your newsroom and PR strategy. Evaluate your newsroom’s navigation periodically to make sure it serves its purpose, and your newsroom is up-to-date and meeting today's standards.

3. Shareability is key

Living in an era in which social media is an essential part of daily life, there is no way to dismiss the potential and importance of social for your newsroom. Shareability is a key essential for a successful newsroom, visitors expect to find links to your social media channels and buttons to easily share content on their own social profiles easily. To make sure the visitor knows what to expect when navigating to your social media channels, include your social media content on your newsroom and press releases. Presenting social media content on your newsroom and press releases provides the opportunity to create a specific expectation on what to find on your social media channels, to show extra content that might be of interest to your visitor, and to present yourself as an organization that posts interesting content regularly.

Alongside including social media into every relevant aspect in your newsroom and press releases, there are other ways to make sure your content can be shared easily. Make sure the newsletters and mailings you send out include a working ‘forward to a friend’ link. Content that has been forwarded by an acquaintance is usually given higher value, so make it easy to forward your content to others. Adding embed codes and using file sharing sites like YouTube and SlideShare, make it easy for visitors to freely share your content. People who have not visited your site yet, may come across your content through these channels. This poses an interesting way to connect with new potential visitors and potential leads.

4. Look and feel matters

Branding is important to make sure your visitors recognize your brand and brand story easily. That way you provide context and put your name out there. The look and feel of your newsroom should correspond with your main or corporate website to provide the visitors a consistent experience throughout the website and to communicate clearly where they have ended up after clicking a link. This enhances trust, provides clarity and creates relevant context for your visitor, which improves your bounce rates.

The look & feel of the newsroom should also provide a clear, pleasant and engaging way of consuming the content you provide. Publishing large amounts of text without any visuals and just a few paragraphs makes it very difficult to read the information you are sharing. Enrich your news release with images, infographics, slideshares and video to create a pleasurable experience for your visitors. Use a media gallery to group all visuals you have used so visitors can view those in a gallery module, and download and share these images on other platforms and websites. By using layout and design elements to place and highlight visuals, video, quotes and contact information, you make it easier to recognize and digest the different formats of content on your page. The use of link buttons and clear CTA’s support an enjoyable experience for your newsroom visitors and makes it easier to act upon the information they have just consumed.

5. Spark the conversation

Having a certain amount of visitors on your website or newsroom doesn’t say too much about the conversation you are having with them. In order to build lasting relationships with your audiences, make sure interactions flow in both directions. Is it easy for visitors to engage in a conversation with your organization and the relevant team members when they visit your newsroom? If not, you might lose the best (and sometimes only) possibility to connect with the newsroom visitor. Make sure any and every visitor of your newsroom is able to easily connect with you to keep the conversation going.

Include contact information in the newsroom and in all press releases of the relevant team members and the general contact information of the organization, where applicable

Make it easy for newsroom visitors to react to your press releases: add comment forms on press releases, link to social media channels where visitors can comment on posts, include a contact form or contact information to use when visitors would want to comment on a press release

React to all comments on your press releases and social media channels timely and engage in conversations your visitors and followers start

Focus on a responsive website also and make sure all functionalities are available on mobile devices

Think about who you are trying to communicate with

Using and improving your newsroom should always focus on the person you are trying to communicate with. The visitor of your newsroom is leading, what does he or she expect from your newsroom and press releases? By implementing best practices, you should be one step ahead of the game. Measuring the way visitors use and don’t use your newsroom should provide valuable insight as well. Asking your visitors for feedback directly may also be a valuable way of gathering input to improve your newsroom, but be careful not to overcharge your visitors. If you focus on the visitors and potential visitors of your newsroom, you should be able to get the most out of it and successfully support your PR strategy with your user oriented online presence.

Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your PR strategy? Request a free 14-day trial to try it out.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,content,designTue, 27 Jun 2017 03:09:35 -0500Putting the personal into PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/putting-the-personal-into-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/putting-the-personal-into-pr/Allowing your employees and management to become an ambassador for your brand can be both challenging and rewarding. At PR is Key, social business strategist Jochem Koole explained why and how your colleagues should get involved into your corporate communications and PR efforts.
]]>Relationship are not built between institutions, but between individuals. The world that we know is being challenged. TheEdelman Trust Barometershows that trust in the four key institutions - business, government, NGOs, and media - is in crisis. The good news is that individual employees are being perceived as trustworthy. Now more than ever, organizations must break with their long-established traditions of corporate communication, and work towards a new, more integrated operating model that puts people at the center of activity. Your ability to build personal relationships with your stakeholders can create a distinctive and competitive advantage. So, the question shouldn’t be why your PR strategy has to be personal, but rather how you can achieve this.

Select and train your content heroes

Employees who engage on social media and blogs in a personal and professional way, are actively building relationships with their target audiences. It is key to support these enthusiastic employees by educating them on how they can use online tools in a meaningful way to contribute to their (personal) business goals. It’s better to forget about an “army of content soldiers”, but instead focus on the 1% of passionate workers who are really willing to act as ambassadors for your brand. Show them how to do that in a way that personally benefits them and won’t take up too much of their time.

There are three main ways in which employees can act as ambassador and engage with their target audience.

Simply listen and learn about the (potential) client’s challenges, needs and considerations.

Showcase their knowledge and expertise in their online profiles. Let your reader know it’s more about their needs, not about your services, by using more ‘you’s’ than ‘I’s’.

Publish and distribute your brand's content, but also expose their personal expertise by writing blogs or articles.

Motivating employees

Even enthusiastic employees need support and motivation from their PR department to put themselves ‘out there’. People often feel that they don’t have the time to contribute to your online reputation and do not prioritize this. Therefore it is important that you help them, facilitate their efforts and make them realize that putting in a bit of extra work can go a long way. For example, when they visit an event, a tweet or an update on LinkedIn can already contribute to positive brand awareness. Furthermore, you could use employee advocacy tools by scheduling tweets and posts for colleagues to distribute on their personal networks. Unfortunately, the reach of content being posted on company pages and through these scheduling tools is declining. Having your employees sharing brand content on their personal social media pages will increase your reach and will pose an opportunity to get your message across to interesting and new audiences. There are at least seven points of contact between varying actors before sales are being finalized, online presence of employees can be one of them.

Convincing the brass

To put the personal in PR you might have to change some of your ways and to do so you probably need your management team’s support, as you need a combination of time and money to turn this strategy into practice. The important factor in convincing upper management to allocate extra time, manpower and budget is to gain some success first, and take it from there. Show your bosses how there’s money to be made by making PR more personal. Send out monthly reports on your results, listing not only to “soft” KPI’s like reach and sentiment, but also “hard” ones like leads and deals that can be attributed to your PR efforts. The more success you gain, the more involved your bosses will get.

From colleagues to ambassadors

In summary, there are five best practices when it comes to putting the personal into PR:

Allow and encourage your colleagues to use online technologies to establish direct professional relationships.

Show your colleagues why they should invest their time in brand ambassadorship and teach them how to do it.

Forget the army of content soldiers and focus on the 1% that is willing and able to invest time.

Don’t use too much PR and marketing speak when talking to your boss: talking money helps.

Celebrate your successes, no matter how little they are. Sharing results helps enthuse the rest of the organization.

​​

]]>priskey,Public Relations,PressPage,news,content,event,ambassadorFri, 16 Jun 2017 07:37:00 -0500The whole news publication process has become faster and more efficient for Daimlerhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-whole-news-publication-process-has-become-faster-and-more-efficient-for-daimler/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-whole-news-publication-process-has-become-faster-and-more-efficient-for-daimler/When the old system for creating and publishing press releases was terminated, several local Daimler offices were presented with the challenge of not having an up to date system for their PR teams. Daimler Poland was among the offices who seized the opportunity and opted for a new tool, which made publishing news to their website a lot easier and less time consuming . “Now we don’t have to wait when a press release is published, it is published to the website immediately.”
]]>Looking forward to self driving cars, reliable green options and other huge developments in the near future, the Automotive industry is fast growing and ever-changing. For brands within the automotive industry, such as Daimler, it is important to have a stable presence in the media and to ensure that information about the brand is easily accessible. Jaroslaw Morawski: “Journalists don’t have time to spend searching on the website to check if new articles are published online.”

Totally outdated

Daimler's realization that their old media platform was insufficient to their needs led them to seek other solutions. It was ‘totally outdated’ and needed to be replaced with a new platform. Morawski: “The old system was not intuitive and it was complicated.” Although all options for a new system were arranged for the global sites, local offices needed find their own solution. With Daimler Poland looking for a new tool, PressPage offered the solution.

Jaroslaw Morawski, responsible for ecommerce & CRM within Mercedes-Benz Trucks Poland, is supporting his colleagues with the creation of press releases. He trains them in using PressPage and, if needed, helps with publishing the releases via the platform. Morawski: “In the old system, we needed to undertake a lot of manual steps. Publishing a press release took a lot of time and mistakes were easily made.”

Time saver

Compared to the old system, Morawski sees lots of positive changes through using PressPage. “Before I needed transfer the articles from the corporate website one by one and check if these had the same layout. With PressPage, the releases we post are automatically shown on the homepage and through the use of tags, we do not need to put all the articles into a category by hand.” For Daimler Poland the biggest advantage is the ease of creating a press release in the system. “We were used to doing a lot of things manually, such as connecting the releases to the navigation, assigning them to specific categories and individually uploading each and every picture. Now we can easily create a release and publish it directly our website.“

The publication workflow has become faster and more efficient, due to the intuitive interface and flexibility of the platform. Morawski: “What is also important for us is that our newsroom matches with the corporate identity. The template of the Daimler Poland newsroom is similar to the Corporate Daimler Media site because the same look and feel has been applied. Now we do not need to spend time creating the layout for our own press releases in our newsroom. This enables us to be consistent in our appearance online.”

Keep improving

Although using PressPage has led to an optimized publication process, Daimler Poland continues searching for opportunities to improve their main communication platform. Morawski: “One of the things we are looking at is PressPage Mail, so that we can proactively inform journalists about new press releases that are published. Although we are already using Twitter and other social media to communicate, sending notifications via email would be a nice addition to our current process.”

The biggest advantage of using PressPage compared to the old system is the time spent to publish a press release. The newsroom being shown in the same look & feel as the corporate website, was one of the reasons to implement a new system. “We don’t need to spend time to manually create the layout of the press release.” Morawski and his colleagues are very happy with the time saved using this new platform. “Here the system automatically publishes the whole package. Our colleagues are all satisfied, we only have positive comments.”

Below you can the previous newsroom (left) and how the current newsroom looks like (right).

]]>news,case,NewClientThu, 15 Jun 2017 04:02:32 -0500The in's and out's of influencer marketinghttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-ins-and-outs-of-influencer-marketing/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-ins-and-outs-of-influencer-marketing/Influencer marketing is hot. According tothis study, 93% of PR and marketing professionals consider using influencers in their brand awareness strategies. But before you dive into an adventure with a random influencer, be sure you know what you are getting yourself into and why. As with introducing any new strategy or platform, start out with defining your goals and target audience.
]]>What is influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is using influential people to get your message across to target audiences. This practice isn’t new: in 1760,Josiah Westwoodused royal endorsements to promote his pottery and chinaware brand. In this day and age, influencer marketing hasn’t changed too much. The message today is quite similar to that of Josiah Westwood’s endorsers. Influencers communicate with their audiences directly (mostly on social media), and are able to endorse a brand or product through their posts.Influencersand brands need to find a way to communicate with the target audience in a way that is authentic, suitable, interesting and entertaining.

One of the biggest differences between influencer marketing and, for example, television commercials, is the rules and regulations influencers need to consider. Since influencer marketing in its current form (focus on social media) is quite new, most countries don’t have a lot of rules and regulations covering sponsored posts and campaigns by influencers. Where ‘traditional’ commercials need to adhere all kinds of rules and regulations, influencer marketing has a bit more freedom toplay with. Besides that, sponsored posts by influencers arebeing received differentlythan commercials on television or in magazines.

Influencer marketing and PR

Why is influencer marketing important for PR professionals? Influencers already have a following thattrusts the influencerand his or her content. PR is about building relationships based on trust, influencers have already done that. By teaming up with a relevant influencer, their following will be introduced to your brand and brand story in a way they will take it more seriously. By building relationships with influencers, you are indirectly connecting with your audience in a very personal and valuable way. Also, influencers can provide valuable insights into your target audiences. Listen to what they have to say!

Word-of-mouth publicityis still the most effective way to promote your business, collaborating with an influencer will ensure a direct connection with your target audience in a way that is perceived as, more or less, word-of-mouth or personal endorsement. Boosting engagement and creating authentic content about a brand are thetop benefitsof using influencer marketing.

One of the best practices in influencer marketing, is focussing onsmaller influencersto target specific audiences instead of focussing on reach. By focussing on smaller influencers, the conversion rates go up compared to the ‘big fish’ that have more followers. The feeling of authenticity and the genuine focus on a specific subject on the channels a smaller influencer uses, help boost the engagement of posts.

Sponsored postswill reach quality prospects when zooming in on a specific audience which is interesting for your brand, and it will increase the credibility of your brand. And, while we’re at it, focussing on vlogs is proving to be a very popular trend. While blogs were the way to go for the past years, vlogs are the name of the game nowadays. Cooperating with vloggers can be done in many ways. Inviting vloggers to your event, creating sponsored content for their online channels or providing interesting samples or trials vloggers can create a video on, are just a few examples of how PR and influencers can cooperate to create engaging content.

Case study:Daniel Wellington

One of the most inspiring examples of how influencer marketing can help boost a brand, is Daniel Wellington. This brand was founded in 2011 and produces unisex watches. By focussing on influencer marketing through Instagram, the company sold theirmillionth watchin 2014. They reached out to both top tier and smaller influencers to boost their brand, and inspires their customers with photo contests to upload pictures with their watch using the hashtag #danielwellington. By providingunique discount codesfor each influencer, they were able to track the traffic an influencer attracted and inspire the influencer to actively encourage their followers to buy a watch.

This resulted in a mix of professional and user generated content that all boosted the same hashtag. One of the reasons Daniel Wellington is doing so well, is that they were one of the first to spot and use influencers on Instagram to boost brand awareness. Byrepostinguser generated content to their massively popular Instagram page, users are continuously invited to upload photos of their watches using the hashtag. The buzz that surrounds the brand has not faded and the focus on influencer marketing has proven to be a successful strategy.

Lessons learned from influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is not just a new trend in marketing, it is an indicator of the changing field of PR, marketing and content. The direct and authentic communication to a specific audience that makes influencers as popular as they are, is just one of the many reasons we should pay attention to the developments in this field. The main lessons we can learn from looking at influencer marketing are:

Target specific audiences to boost engagement and conversion, instead of focussing on reach. By focussing on a specific group, you are able to connect with them on the platform they are at in a way they like to be addressed. Your audience isn’t ‘everyone’, so don’t try to reach everyone.

Conversion is key. You could reach a million people with a post. If none of them subscribe to your newsletter or request information, what’s the point? Make sure the effort you make serves your goal.

It’s all aboutrelationships. Your clients, prospects, audience and community, you need a healthy relationship with them in order to keep them satisfied. This means giving and taking, building trust and meeting the expectations of your audience.

Relationships are built on trust. Make sure you present yourself as a trustworthy source of information. Influencers who post too many sponsored posts are in danger of being viewed as a ‘sell-out’, which will defeat your purpose. Focus on sharing content that adds value.

Become a thought leader or even an influencer yourself by sharing valuable content, nurturing relationships with other influencers and your community, and focussing on a relevant niche.

Are you ready to dive into the world of influencers? Make sure you specify your goal, target audience and strategy. With that in mind, do some research to find the influencers that best fit your goal, audience and brand, and to think of ways to cooperate with these influencers. When you make sure your collaboration makes sense to your target audience, influencers might be a great new addition to your PR strategy.

]]>news,influencer,pr,public relations,influencer marketing,ambassador,contentTue, 13 Jun 2017 08:30:00 -0500Stay up-to-date with all trends & development in the PR industryhttps://www.presspage.com/news/stay-up-to-date-with-trends-development-pr-industry/
https://www.presspage.com/news/stay-up-to-date-with-trends-development-pr-industry/Subscribe to our bimonthly newsletterPR is an ever-changing field of business, in which the PR professional need to stay on top of all new trends & developments. However we know that the life of a PR professional is a hectic and quite busy one.

Stay on top with our newsletter

To help you stay up to date with the trends and development in the PR industry, we have created a bi-monthly overview of articles. This contains clear-cut how to’s, engaging case studies and essential expert advice. Get inspired to gain the best results with you PR strategy!

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Blog,News,trend,content,about PressPageThu, 01 Jun 2017 09:47:23 -0500The dark side of Brand Journalism is crucialhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-dark-side-of-brand-journalism-is-crucial/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-dark-side-of-brand-journalism-is-crucial/To strengthen their relationships with other departments as well as their influence at the management table, PR departments should be positioned at the very heart of their organization. At PR is Key, Sébastien Willems, co-founder and CEO of PressPage, pressed the case for fully embedded PR departments using the recent PR crisis at United Airlines as an example.
]]>The violent removal of a passenger from an overbooked United Airlines flight triggered an outraged public to post heated comments all over the media. The incident quickly turned into a PR nightmare that got worse by the day. This crisis could have been avoided if the PR department had been sufficiently embedded in the organization. Hundreds of earlier incidents with involuntary deplaning resulted in conflicts between airlines and passengers. It was just a matter of time before a passenger would refuse to leave the plane and a situation like this would make the news some day.

The advantages of a fully embedded PR department include thought-through communication to the media, agreement within the organization about the outgoing statements, high levels of trust in the PR department and even avoidance of crises through critical evaluation of policies to determine risks. At United Airlines, this was all clearly absent. As a PR professional, you need to be able to explain why things like United’s passenger removal procedures are in place. You should have no trouble explaining why these rules are a good thing, or at least defend them with conviction. If you can’t without feeling awkward about your own story, that should raise a red flag. At United, a lack of conviction and agreement resulted in mixed messages with incomplete and contradicting information.

To prevent crises like this from happening, you need to notice the red flags among existing policies and take them up with upper management. Of course, you can only warn management about PR risks if you are aware of them yourself. The flight attendants at United Airlines already hated the involuntary removals, so HR probably knew about it. HR should have talked to management and PR to let everyone know about this crisis waiting to happen. The same goes for the pilots, who issuedtheir own statementblaming the police, which only added fuel to the fire. They bypassed their PR colleagues and went to their union, resulting in a letter that went against the airline’s official position at the time.

Internal communication

Why do these communication problems between PR and other departments in an organization exist? Too often, employees in other departments don’t see their PR colleagues as acting on their level, assuming PR people don’t know what’s really going on and are only focused on sending out their happy press releases. The PR team is only called in to fix things when a crisis has already started. This is not simply the fault of the other departments. The PR team itself has a critical role to play in creating systems and workflows for effective crisis management AND prevention.

Looking at president Eisenhower’s well-knownurgent-important matrix, many people will recognize that most of their work is focused on the first quadrant: important and urgent tasks. Focusing instead on tasks which are important, but less urgent, helps to manage time, reduce stress and tackle risks before they become a problem. As a PR professional, you shouldn’t only look for positive stories to share right now, but also listen to negative feedback that could cause a crisis later on. Proactively engaging with colleagues, like the flight attendants at United Airlines, is vital for collecting all possible reputation risks on your radar.

Getting a seat at the table

The next step is finding a listening ear in upper management. If you work in PR and already have a seat at the management table, you’re very lucky. Management meetings are usually all about marketing and sales, partly because those departments have lots of quantifiable data and countless tools at their disposal to generate reports for the management team. The PR industry is lagging far behind in this regard, and without hard data on ROI it’s more difficult for management to figure out what’s needed of them. To assist management and improve the chances of being heard, PR teams would do well to make a list of PR risks, with specified risk levels per item and short summaries on what the proposed action would look like.

The most important thing is for the whole organization to become aware of the fact that the PR department is not just there to spin stories to make the company look good, and putting out fires which already started. The PR team should do its best to actively engage and look for risks in the organization, and every other employee should know they can contact their PR colleagues with their concerns. A fully embedded PR department with a seat at the management table has the best chance of guarding their company’s reputation, handling crises both preemptively and as they unfold.

]]>news,content,priskey,branding,eventMon, 29 May 2017 04:40:43 -0500Taking control of your corporate brandinghttps://www.presspage.com/news/taking-control-of-your-corporate-branding/
https://www.presspage.com/news/taking-control-of-your-corporate-branding/The why and how of PR workflow consistency Establishing global PR guidelines is of vital importance to corporate branding. Enforcing those guidelines with a unified choice of tools and platforms makes for an organizational workflow that fosters consistency and improves internal processes.
]]>The decline in the number of journalists and the rise of PR professionals are well documented. In the US, PR workers now outnumber journalists by about five to one. As Pew Research haspointed out, organizations are increasingly able to reach out to the public directly, in any number of ways, while journalists encounter greater difficulty in checking and confirming information from outside sources. This increase in PR power comes with corresponding changes in media relations and (therefore) PR responsibility. Media, stakeholders and target audiences increasingly look at PR departments for consistent, reliable and recognizable narratives.

Consistent branding

Protocols and standards enhance consistent branding. Consequently, from a sender's perspective, a natural first step is to set up and incorporate PR guidelines to be used by all global branches within the organization. They include general and specific instructions for press releases (format, layout, tone of voice, boilerplate), rich media (formats, sizes, resolutions, styles) and templates for documents like brochures and white papers.

Being in control of all this means making sure your PR output always looks like it came from one person, even though you may have dozens of teams around the world working on it. A lot of this has to do with your organization's visual branding. Consistent use of logos, icons, colors and fonts goes a long way in generating a brand that is instantly recognized by readers, viewers and visitors. For global brands with many different national websites, this means ensuring all newsrooms look the same at any given moment. Visitors who are familiar with a newsroom’s layout, instantly know where to look for the content you want to share with them. A good example of a company who is ensuring a consistent branding, is Velux. Not only theircorporate office, but also local offices such asThe NetherlandsandRussiahave the same look & feel to support the global brand. With minor differences in these newsrooms (such as a different social media channel), they all look and feel the same but are though personalised per office.

Workflow wins

This brings us to the why and how of workflow consistency. A major step in securing a unified brand look and feel is using the same tools and platforms throughout the whole organization. Working with the same system guarantees a level of consistency in PR processes, and facilitates easy and uniform coordination and training for departments worldwide. A corporate identity change is particularly straightforward when templates, logos and boilerplates can be simultaneously adjusted in all newsrooms and press releases. A SaaS solution that functions independently from the rest of the website can even be instantly migrated in the event of a complete website redesign.

The same goes for measuring the results of your PR efforts. Using the same monitoring system for all global outlets creates a comprehensive overview with easy comparisons of metrics from different locations. This in turn helps with choosing the standards formeasuring and reportingon the return on investment (ROI) of your PR practices.

Win-win

An organizational workflow as described above derives consistency from its global PR guidelines and efficiency from its uniform use of tools and platforms. Internally, this makes for easier cooperation, training and managing of potential changes in corporate branding and identity. Externally, it ensures a consistent conveyance of your brand to all media, customer bases and stakeholders. A win-win situation for everyone involved!

]]>news,consistency,branding,workflow,contentFri, 19 May 2017 03:00:00 -0500The added value of online data for PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-added-value-of-online-data-for-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-added-value-of-online-data-for-pr/Data can be invaluable to your PR practices, but only if you take the time to translate it into actionable insights. During his talk at PR is Key, OBI4wan’s Alexander de Ruiter explained how.
]]>Data in itself is not very important or valuable. We all gather data in one way or another, but if you only glance at it and go about your usual business, the data is not going to provide any useful information. Most organizations create and publish content based on their own needs and predictions, and turn to data afterwards to check if they performed like they thought they would. But what if you turn that order around?

Thinking before speaking

Practicing PR with the use of data means manoeuvring through a never-ending cycle of publishing content, monitoring results and market trends, analyzing gathered data, and engaging with your audience. If you start a campaign with monitoring instead of publishing, you can use market insights and data to help decide what you need to create, and predict what the outcomes will be. This greatly improves the chance your efforts will turn out to be worthwhile.

Currently, upper management often instructs PR professionals to create a content strategy based on preconceived notions about company and customer needs. Data generally doesn’t factor in, even though every organization has access to it. Even if you don’t actively collect data yourself, there’s enough of it available in the public space, for instance on social media and review sites. The focus for determining what content to create should shift from self-proclaimed certainties to data-backed arguments.

From raw data to personal contact

When it comes to engaging with your audience to positively influence your reputation, it’s important to dismiss the misconception that your organization has an online and an offline reputation. Newspaper stories end up on social media and vice versa. You have only one reputation, and data can help you manage it. For example, OBI4wan’s own data showed that using the company’s corporate social media accounts led to much less engagement (20%) than using personal employee accounts (up to 70-80%).

So though you may be tempted to push your brand by sending everything through your corporate account, you should never forget social media are still about individual people communicating with each other. This is also relevant when analyzing why a specific piece of content was particularly successful or unsuccessful. Who are the influencers who are framing your story in a positive or negative way? What are they picking up on? Are they journalists or public figures? Would you benefit from reaching their audiences by engaging with them? Knowing why you’re performing the way you are is crucial for the engagement part of your PR cycle.

Of course, there are countless ways you can gather, analyze and use data for your PR practices. Historical data can help you decide what to create, when to publish it and how to distribute it. Real-time monitoring data can then assist in engaging with influencers and stakeholders. It can reveal all kinds of traffic and feedback, and you shouldn’t restrict yourself to only responding to negative comments. If you ignore the positive messages, people will eventually stop posting them, wiping out your opportunities for sharing free endorsements. It’s not bragging if someone else is saying it!

]]>news,priskey,event,roiWed, 17 May 2017 03:25:40 -0500SEO for PR pros: start with these three basicshttps://www.presspage.com/news/seo-for-pr-pros-start-with-these-three-basics/
https://www.presspage.com/news/seo-for-pr-pros-start-with-these-three-basics/Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something which most PR pros are familiar with by now. The big problem with SEO, as with most things technical, is that it is very easy to get stuck in the weeds with the overwhelming amount of topics and advice online. You may have heard about new SEO buzzwords in 2017 like AMP, https, and voice search. The reality is that if you don’t get the basics right, you should not worry about these trends.
]]>For the PR professional who is jumping from deadline to deadline, the best path forward is to keep it simple and focus on a few big SEO related tasks at a time. In the case of SEO, as it is with most things, doing a few things well is better than doing many things half-heartedly.

But one thing we stress to clients is to not completely ignore SEO. You can have the best article in the world, but if it isn’t optimized for SEO, you will lose out on big traffic numbers.

So, what are the things that if done well can put you ahead of most of your competitors?

Mobile Optimization

For many years now mobile has risen in importance relative to desktop, and in 2016 Google changed its algorithm to reflect the significance of mobile.

For PR professionals, this means ensuring your work website is mobile responsive. Journalists aren’t necessarily looking at your website behind a computer. They are often in the field or at press conferences and like regular people, looking for information on their mobile phones.

So how do you optimize for mobile?

If you haven’t already, ensure the next refresh of your website includes a responsive mobile website. Google has indicated it prefers responsive design over having a separate “m.” version of your website.

Backlinks still rule

Backlinks are the incoming links to your web pages, and despite claims suggesting otherwise, they are still the most critical element to a well ranking page in search.

It makes sense that Google would see the pages people are linking to (and thus talking about) as high quality content, and thus promote it in its search results.

There are a few key things to remember about backlinks:

Quality is just as important as quantity. Google will attribute greater SEO value if your web page is linked from a high quality source (e.g. a respected news organization) than it will for a low quality source (e.g. a spammy site)

Diversify your sources: Google looks favorable if your links are coming from a diverse range of domains (websites), as opposed to fewer ones

But good things don’t come easy. Backlinks carry a lot of value because they are difficult to implement. How do you get another website to link to your webpages?

The backbone of cultivating outside links to your web page is to have awesome content. Think about your content calendar for 2017. Are you writing content that people in your industry or in the news would be willing to share?

Guest posts: writing a guest post for another blog or website is a great way to send traffic back to your domain. If you have experts in your organization, encouraging them to write elsewhere can boost the presence of your website or newsroom.

Reduce your bounce rates

If your bounce rates are high, it means that visitors to your website are not finding the content they are looking for.

Suppose someone searches for ‘Green Australian Snakes’ and they click into your webpage. But instead of information about Green Australian Snakes, your page is about socks you are selling called ‘Green Australian Snakes’. This results in people immediately ‘bouncing off’ your page in search of the content they are actually looking for.

Google’s algorithm perceives this to as your web page does not meet the expectations of the search result. Higher bounce rates usually equal a lower ranking in search result.

To improve the bounce rate, try these methods:

If the right traffic is coming to your website, but your bounce rate is high, think about what your audience is looking for and improve your content. Are they looking for easy to access ‘how to’ information? Are they looking for a list of useful resources? Adapting your content to the user’s expectations will be a big step in keeping them on your page.

Make your ‘Call to Action’ prominent. You’ve improved your content. Your audience even likes it as it matches their expectations from their search. But what now? Are you leading them to other pages they might useful through powerful call to actions? Or are they clicking off your page immediately leading to a ‘bounce’?

Include interesting and engaging text ‘above the fold’. If your best content requires scrolling, many of your visitors may never get to see it.

Reduce your loading speeds and creating a good user experience, especially on mobile.

Ready to get started?

It’s time to put these basics into practice. These three SEO areas, if implemented correctly and consistently, will lead to big traffic wins for your newsroom. But what else do you need? Check out three of the most useful tools for PR professionals to learn how to best optimize your content.

]]>news,seo,tipsTue, 16 May 2017 09:09:23 -0500Visual crosses all bordershttps://www.presspage.com/news/visual-crosses-all-borders/
https://www.presspage.com/news/visual-crosses-all-borders/Visual communication is the number one trend in Public Relations. Globally understood, visual crosses all borders, no matter which language you speak. At PR is Key best-selling author Rob Brown spoke about the developments in language in PR.
]]>Language is continuously changing, not only in its meaning but also in its content and distribution. The rise of social media did not only increase the speed of communication, but also altered the way we interact. Language is being activated and words like ‘exit’, that used to be nouns, are now used as verbs. Furthermore computers, smartphones, and tablets make sure that we can connect anytime and anywhere we want. As a result, a large part of our conversations nowadays are facilitated by technology, initiating a shift from formal written communication to more informal personal communication.

Technology has enriched our vocabulary, introducing us to new words such as binge-watching, selfie and abandonware. However, visual communication is by far the most important trend in PR. This reach can be extended to speech – in 2015 the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year was “face with tears of joy”, which is not even one word, and it isn’t even text: it’s an emoji.

Overall, pictographs should not be underestimated. According to Rob Brown ‘Emoji represents actual feelings, emotions and answers. They can be used instead of text and are here to stay. Emoji is indeed globally understood no matter which language you speak. People are sending messages that consist of nothing more than emoji, so they’re actually forming a language of itself.’ Even though speaking of the ‘former era of text-based communication’ as Mashable founder Pete Cashmore argues is extreme, adapting to language is necessary to keep your communication up to speed.

Data-driven communication

So what makes for good visual communication? Video usage is already soaring and continues to grow, but to piggyback on this evolution you need to surprise people and grab their attention. Brown reluctantly mentions Donald Trump as an example of someone who excels at this, knowing the power of a limited amount of words on the right channel to grab and hold attention. Important to recognize is that merely adding a picture or other visual to your message is not sufficient and therefore does not guarantee success in any way. For example, when you want to inform your followers that you are present at an event, do not post a picture of the venue but an ‘action picture’ instead. Be honest, would you rather like a formal picture in front of a stage or an unexpected picture that caught you off guard? In short, visual content has the ability to surprise and trigger a reaction, and it is up to you to make use of that.

Data is another factor that helps to determine whether visual communication is strong. Brown: ‘The concept of what is newsworthy, is becoming very data driven: predictions about the number of views a video will get are now important factors in deciding whether or not to produce the video in the first place.’ What makes this decision increasingly easy, is the fact that producing video content has become extremely cheap and easy. Everyone with a modern smartphone can shoot high quality videos now. ‘With the combination of ubiquitous internet, apps for broadcast and devices to view and consume, we are now able to communicate using visual content in real time.’

Events that particularly lend themselves well for the purpose of live coverage, rather than watching on-demand, are sport events. New technologies and WiFi-connected cameras allow for real-time editing and publishing, and can enable you to dominate social and conventional media. For example, a team of six, worked shifts over five days posting content on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube for the live, visually driven coverage of the 2016 Track Cycling World Championships, and delivered an astonishing 450 million impacts in social channels.

The future, for now

Whether the increase in popularity of video and visual content is a clear-cut change that will last, remains unclear. Yet the foundations of PR seem to be stable over time. The traditional value hierarchy of Television > Radio > Newspapers has not really changed and just reframed into Video > Audio > Text. It is all about embracing the opportunities that technology has to offer and use them to improve and strengthen your communication strategy. The expectation to consume media and access real-time information wherever we are, using our smartphones, requires new channels. Nevertheless, new media usually doesn’t mean the end of older ones, and text will not die out. At least, as long as you adapt to the modern languages.

]]>news,priskey,eventThu, 11 May 2017 01:00:03 -0500Every crisis is an opportunity: fact or fiction?https://www.presspage.com/news/every-crisis-is-an-opportunity-fact-or-fiction/
https://www.presspage.com/news/every-crisis-is-an-opportunity-fact-or-fiction/Does every crisis present an organization with a silver lining and an opportunity? Or is this another hackneyed idea? Here are three tips to increase your chances of drawing a positive outcome when a crisis hits.
]]>A crisis can do irreparable damage to an organization, but at the same time it also presents an ideal time to review and renew current processes. It puts an organization into conflict: on one hand there is an urge to return to the status-quo as soon as possible, while also creating a situation in which relevant aspects are being evaluated, revealing options to improve. For a crisis to have a silver lining, certain things need to occur.

Neutralise the negative impact

When a crisis hits, your first action should be to blunt its negative edge, by listening and responding to any affected parties in an emotionally intelligent manner.

Jonathan Bernstein, president of the consulting firm Bernstein Crisis Management,suggests“what [an organization] should do when there’s [an injury] associated with one of his company’s products is respond, first and foremost, with compassion, and then with words that express competence and confidence".

Alton Towers, a British theme park, provided a commendable example of this through its handling of acrisis in July 2015. After two women were injured on one of their rollercoasters, the organization proactively communicated to the press, offering any kind of assistance the women or their families needed. By being delicate and considerate towards the victims, they minimized the negative backlash in the media about Alton Towers.

While Alton Towers’ strategy limited the negative effect on the organization, it is also possible for organizations to emerge in better shape after a crisis, than before it began. In 2014, after the sportswear company Under Armour had publicly exhibited its high-performance speedskating suits, the company fell into a global PR crisis when the US team wearing the suits at Sochi Winter Olympics started losing races. Fingers were pointed towards Under Armour’s suits, and the Wall Street Journal headlined a story titled “Under Armour Suits May Be a Factor in U.S. Speedskating's Struggles." The company’s response, which included “responding quickly, frequently reiterating the company's mission statement, putting top executives in the media and making sure not to blame the athletes”, not only alleviated the crisis, it actually boosted the brand’s confidence. The company’s stock which initially dipped 2.4%, quickly rebounded and rose, and Under Armour resigned the US speedskating team to its brand for another 8 years.

The importance of timing and taking the lead

A strong crisis communication strategy is not enough to ensure your organization can escape a crisis unscathed.

Other factors including company culture, stakeholder interest, and the attitude of the board are important. Are all of the organization’s representatives on the same page? When solving the crisis, are we taking the victims and stakeholders into account? Is the CEO seen as the cause of the problem and is there pressure for them to step down? Communicating about solutions and changes will only help if these actually take place.

While not every crisis may lead to a positive outcome, stopping the bleeding can certainly feel like a success. Some other tips to ensure this include:

Intervene as quickly as possible to prevent an incident developing into a crisis. An incident is easier to control and steer towards a positive outcome than a full blown crisis. The longer you wait before addressing the issue, the larger the sacrifices and concessions will be that you need to undertake to solve the crisis

Take a step back, broaden your view, and answer the following questions: how will you look back at this crisis in twelve months time? What went well, what went wrong? By taking a few moments to think about these questions, you can still influence the answers before it is too late

Communicate in clear and precise terms, both internally and externally, that you take this crisis seriously. Then set out the steps you will undertake to solve the situation. The message that should be prominent, is ‘We are addressing the problem’

Well prepared for a crisis

While these tips will help to increase the chances of steering a crisis towards a positive outcome, it is far more important to be prepared for a crisis. Though preparation won’t make you bulletproof, there are things you can arrange in advance to ensure you won’t be blown away when the crisis does happen. The most important tasks and best practices can be found in our checklist, which will help you manage your internal and external communication in these circumstances.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Blog,news,crisisTue, 09 May 2017 01:29:00 -0500California State University San Marcos: a textbook case of crisis preparationhttps://www.presspage.com/news/california-state-university-san-marcos-a-textbook-case-of-crisis-preparation/
https://www.presspage.com/news/california-state-university-san-marcos-a-textbook-case-of-crisis-preparation/“You never think your campus is going to be closed down because of a wildfire, but now we definitely know.”The 2014 Wildfire

Most communicators expect to have to deal with a crisis situation at some point in their career. Yet predicting how a crisis will rear its ugly head is incredibly difficult. While it is impossible to address every potential scenario, implementing a strong team and the right protocols can help effectively steer organizations out of crises.

As they dealt with a deluge of information coming in through one end, and questions from concerned parties from the other, the role of the PR team is a textbook case on how to handle crisis communications:

The team was immediately brought into a ‘Situation Room’, from where they accessed information and disseminated updates every three to five minutes during the first 18 hours of the crisis

The team positioned itself asthesource of information; positioning the PressPage news center as the only official university source for accurate and updated news

Katie Chappell, the social media specialist, monitored and posted on Twitter almost 24/7 for the first two days, proactively providing updates, dispelling false information, and answering panicked questions from concerned students and families

Yet more impressive than the team’s quick response to the crisis, was the textbook crisis management preparation CSUSM undertook following the wildfire incident.

Crisis preparations following the Wildfire

Prior to the wildfire, only one member of the CSUSM staff, the Public Information Officer, had undergone crisis training.

Following the crisis, CSUSM put every member of the crisis team, including the four key members of the PR department through crisis management training workshops. Together with other members of the crisis response team, including college facilities and university police, CSUSM staff ran simulations of potential crisis scenarios.

“It was really fascinating because we were divided into teams and given an emergency. And we had to both act out and write down what we would do in our role. I had to write a press release in three minutes, and also a series of tweets and website updates. In the last session we came together and discussed the issues that came up that needed to be solved, so we could address those in advance of an actual campus emergency”.

In addition to simulation exercises across the crisis response team, the PR team also formalized their own internal processes in preparation for crises. “Now we have pre-written messages and press releases in the event of most campus emergencies. The statements have been vetted and approved by the university leadership and would only need slight updates if they were ever needed.”

Download a 5-Step-Guide to do a dry run for your crisis communications.

All members of the PR team were also given extensive training, including press interviews, social media, and PressPage.

“We definitely all feel like we are as prepared as we could be now”, said Katie, explaining that they now feel well versed in “how and what we’re doing during crises, where we keep the assets related to emergencies, like a big yellow triangle with a red background that we use in any news release that is related to an emergency situation.”

Finally, Katie adds that the PR team were all given extensive cross-training of each other's roles, “so that in the case of emergencies any one of us could do the others job, and that includes using PressPage. We have all our individual roles in the event we’re all here, but also have the ability to take over for each other if we are not”.

The impact of preparation

Since the wildfires, the CSUSM team has had two instances where it used its new crisis management strategies.

Exactly one year after the wildfires shut down CSUSM for a week during commencement, mother nature struck again, and the university was again forced to close down on the day of commencement due to a severe thunderstorm.

“Postponing the commencement ceremony again – two years in a row – is a pretty huge deal,” explains Katie. “So while we didn’t have the same immediate emergency communications, we were able to immediately implement our plan that we had created in the event we have to postpone commencement, especially related to weather.”

With over 10,000 people traveling to attend the commencement ceremony, the CSUSM public relations team had just three days notice to alert people that proceedings would be postponed. But with the learning experience from the year before, as well as its formalized crisis communications collateral including press releases, tweets, and b-roll, CSUSM was able to swiftly and decisively address the issue. In communicating to its internal audience of students, faculty, and families, as well as to the media, the team was prepared for what to say, and what the feedback was going to be. “We were able to answer some questions before they were even asked,” Katie adds.

The result of this preparation was a smooth overall process, with both the school’s internal audience and the media knowing what to expect. “Once we sent out the initial notification, pretty much every major media company in San Diego easily picked up the story from our news center that our commencement ceremony was rescheduled. We had set the expectation for where people could find information, and where we would be updating it. It was a much much smoother process from our perspective.”

Summing up the result of their preparation, Katie concludes, “fewer phone calls, fewer panicked people, and the media knew where to go”.

Increased trust

Apart from the calming effects of deep preparedness, a clear crisis communications strategy has led to longer term reputational benefits for CSUSM.

“We have established ourselves, not only during emergencies, but just in general, asthesource of information, and that we also provide accurate information as quickly as possible.”

Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your PR strategy? Request a free 14-day trial to try it out.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,crisis,educationSat, 06 May 2017 03:03:41 -0500Now is the time for real time PRhttps://www.presspage.com/news/now-is-the-time-for-real-time-pr/
https://www.presspage.com/news/now-is-the-time-for-real-time-pr/The 5 reasons why you should engage in real time PR.Companies are scoring well with retweets when newsjacking, but confidence in their CEOs is at rock bottom. For effective and real-time reputation management, active involvement of the entire organization is indispensable. Here are five reasons why your entire organization needs to engage in real time PR now.
]]>It's almost an understatement to say that PR professionals have seen tremendous changes in their field in recent years. Disruptive technologies, new trends and tools have redefined the business, while the number of online (social) media channels continue to increase. The effectiveness of the old-fashioned press release is far behind us. In many instances, a press release is still justifiable, but with a decreasing corps of journalists, they often have little effect. Hence the fact that wire and press release distribution services are feeling the painful consequences; organizations are less willing to spend their PR budget on non-effective distribution services. They rather invest an increasing share of their money on the production of quality content and more potent and effective online environments such as newsrooms and curation hubs to ensure distribution.

Engage your audience

Online environments and social media -- in contrast to traditional wire distribution-- offer many opportunities to reach a better and potentially larger audience. However, the speed and interactivity of these channels require a vastly different approach and attitude from the PR professional. In order to arouse and hold the interest of your audience, your content should be stimulating and offer a variety in angles. In other words, not be too monotonous. The trend of extended copy being alternated with, or replaced by visual content and other rich media in a way proves this concept.

The ultimate goal is the use of visual content that is not only very powerful for storytelling, but also involves the audience in the activities of the organization. As an example, live streams and even the use of virtual reality, allow PR professionals to make their audience a part of the message instead of just informing them.

Understanding the NOW with real time PR

The available arsenal of tools that can be used for Real time PR purposes is more diverse than ever. PR departments, therefore, also use a vast array of these (often disconnected) tools in order to make sense of the constant flow of online messages. The practice of real time PR --in essence an (inter) active live performance of trend watching and reputation management-- is unthinkable without these types monitoring and curation tools. However, most organizations have not yet embraced the extensive possibilities they offer and often also have an unclear vision of what to do with the possibilities they offer.

There are enough examples of newsjacking and funny Twitter fights by brands. Companies like Heineken, Verizon and KLM are known for their successful campaigns and comments on social media. Although these expressions provide the organization with a sympathetic boost, it is not providing any benefits for their leadership. According to the latest edition of the2017 Edelman Trust Barometerthe confidence in has CEOs plummeted to a record low (see below, sheet 17).

Everyone has a role to play, from trainee to CEO

There is a tremendous gap between the reputation potential that real time PR can provide and the general level of distrust in leadership. Executives would do well to actively engage more openly with the world around them and establish themselves as one of the faces of the organization. And by using the plural, they are not alone. Employees and interns also represent a brand, and for someone who follows a hashtag on Twitter, the tweets of a trainee are as visible as the tweets of the CEO. Everyone has a stake in shaping the timeline.

All this is further enlarged and strengthened in a time of crisis, to which no organization is immune. The benefits of real-time PR can be of major importance during a crisis. Well trained employees and a detailed plan for real-time crisis management can make the difference between a controlled setback and an image disaster.

5 reasons why everyone should engage in real time PR

Overall, there are five reasons why every organization, and the humans that represent it, should engage in real time PR:

The field of the PR professional has spread across many digital platforms that all move at an incredible pace. Maybe the PR department cannot cope with all of it alone?

To only inform is just not good enough. An audience should be quickly and actively involved in your public relations, not only by means of text, but also in a visually compelling manner with images and/or video.

It is hard to miss an opportunity to engage in real time PR. New tools for real-time monitoring and trend watching are quickly becoming more available and affordable.

Not only the posts of the CEO, but also those of employees lower down the hierarchy appear in a public timeline. When everyone is well trained, they can all contribute positively to the reputation of the organization.

Real time PR is essential in times of crisis and should therefore be given a permanent place in the communication.